Each society, as each age, has its own peculiar decalogue, applicable to its own peculiar conditions. For South Africa there are certain commandments little heard of in Europe, because the conditions of life raise no occasion for them, but which loom large in the list of social duties in this land. The first of these would appear to be--_Keep your breeds pure_!
In proportion as this commandment is accepted, and its injunction carried out by our black and white races in South Africa during the next fifty years, so probably, to a large extent, will be our healthy growth and development.[39]
[39] We are well aware of the argument that, by bridging the cavity which yawns between race and race, the Half-caste serves to make possible a more kindly sense of union between the two. We see the weight of this argument, and allow something for it, even much; but, so enormous is the amount of suffering inflicted by the intermingling of the dark and light races in South Africa to-day, that no hypothetical gain seems to justify it.
We have now dealt, with such fullness as for the moment we are able, at the problem of Half-castism, which slavery has been mainly instrumental in bequeathing to South Africa.
At the other multitudinous, and in certain ways more important, effects of slavery on the peoples of South Africa, it will be more convenient to glance later.
In South Africa, as elsewhere among civilized peoples, what an enslaved race may have endured physically is amply avenged by emotional and social loss on the part of the enslaving till the balance of loss inclines, at last, rather in the direction of the owning than the owned.
The good, aboriginal, old South African thought, doubtless, as did his English brother in America, that when his slaves were safely landed, and the slaver had been paid and had sailed away, his black folk had been settled for, and that he had now nothing to do but enjoy in peace the fruits of their labour. But his descendants are learning, and will yet have to learn, with their American cousins, that what was paid on that day was but the first instalment of a long, national debt. We in South Africa have been steadily paying it for two hundred years, and when the last instalment will be due is not yet at all clear.