Thirdly:--There is what, for want of a better name, we may define as the financial and speculative attitude towards the native. This is the attitude of the great labour employers. These in South Africa are practically never individuals but great syndicates, companies, and chartered bodies, the individual members of which are seldom or never brought into any personal contact with the natives whose lives they control. In the majority of cases they are non-resident in South Africa, wholly or for the larger part of their lives. For them the native is not a person hated or beloved, but a commercial asset. To these persons the native question sums itself in two words "cheap labour." Their view of the native question is as clear-cut and simple as the outline of a gallows. There is no intricacy or sentiment about it. The native is the machine through the action of which companies and speculators have to extract the wealth of the South African continent; and the more the machinery costs to keep at work, the smaller the percentage of South African wealth which reaches the hands of the speculator.
For them the native problem is in a nutshell: "In how far, and by what means, can the rate of native wages be diminished, so raising profits?"
It must be remembered that the natives form almost the entire body of the true wage-earning labouring class of South Africa. The European, working in mines or elsewhere, becomes almost at once in the majority of cases simply the overseer or guider of the native labourer; and in mining and other fields of labour natives are rapidly fitting themselves for even the more skilled forms of manual labour.
The question of the relation between the great foreign syndicates and companies and the native races of this country is thus the great labour-question of Europe and America, but complicated enormously by two facts.
Firstly, by the fact that the mass of speculators, company-controllers, and their shareholders are Jews, Englishmen, Americans, or Continentals, wholly non-resident in South Africa, or residing here merely while they make sufficient wealth to ensure their retirement to a life of ease and luxury in Europe, or, in the case of ambitious Englishmen, till they are enabled, by means of their wealth, to enter the English Parliament or obtain titles. From this fact it follows that a decrease in the wages of our native labouring-class and an increase in dividends, while it makes larger the number of yachts on the Mediterranean, the palaces of Jewish and other parvenus in London and on the Continent, and while it increases the gains of the tables at Monte Carlo and of the racing grounds of England, and replenishes the purse of debilitated and degenerate English aristocrats, yet not only adds _nothing_ to the material wealth of South Africa, but positively diminishes those very small returns which, under existing legislation, is all she receives from her mines. European skilled miners and overseers, as a rule, take their extensive earnings back to Europe with them; and, with the exception of what the Government railways may earn, it is mainly through the wages of the native labourer, expended in buying the necessaries of life, and to no inconsiderable extent in supporting his schools and churches, that the legitimate commerce of the country and its general population are benefited by its mineral wealth. Thus, on this all-important point, our native problem, which is also our labour problem, differs materially and most essentially from the labour problem of Europe, in that it is not merely a question of dividing the wealth of the country between one class or another (as is generally the case in Europe and America), but of retaining the products of the land in the land of all.