FUTURE OF AFRICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19779, 28 October 1927, Page 8

FUTURE OF AFRICA.

GREAT COLOUR PROBLEM. NO BHORT CUT POSBIBLE. OPINIONS OK MR. AMERY. THE NEED FOR FRESH BLOC®. . [FSOM OTO OWN COBRESPOXDEXT.] CAPETOWN. Sept. 10. Bouth Africa, said Mr, L. S. Amery the Secretary of State for the Dominions' in an address to the 1820 Memorial Sek tiers* Association, is, from the point of view of climate and physical conditions, an "ideal base from which civilisation csd work. That was to say, a country j n which white men can work and live just as well as the black man.

"It is only the accident that the black man has come down from the interior," Mr. Amery said, "that has prevented this country being like Australia, a purelv white man's country. The question, however, is, is white civilisation going to survive in this continent: It seems to me that that depends entirely upon whether it is going to be reinforced by a stead} stream of fresh blood and its numbers strengthened during the generation immediately ahead of us. I know that that is not -altogether an easy matter. Once you have got" your whole social structure based on the Use of coloured labour, you cannt suddenly shift to an entirely oyw basis.'

"A Labour colleague of mine in the House of Commons the other day suggested that 150,000 working men should be brought out from Great Britain to displace native laboar on the mines and elsewhere. Well, it only requires a little familiarity with South African conditions to know that these short cuts are not possible. You have got to begin at the end where the work is at present carried on by white men and gradually enable the sphere of the white man's work tc extend. You cannot do that in a single week, but you can do it by steadily and persistently following a definite purpose, berapy* what seems clear to me is that if white civilisation is not going to extend its field of activity as compared with coloured labour, then it will begin to go back. "If once South Africa reaches a sta tionary position, with no fresh blood com ing in, then you have reached a position when the white element is beginning to be merged into the coloured, and year after year one sphere or another of eccu pation will be lost to the white man; and once it begins to go back then the country will cease to be a country to attract a white population from other parts of the world, and it will become definitely a country in which sooner or later the white race will be submerged in a parti-col oured population. "This," said Mr. Amery, '"is not an or binary political issue. It cannot be settled by ordinary methods of political contest, but by the people of Sooth Africa as a whole realising what lies in store for the future and determining to get themselves strengthened and refreshed and invigorated by a steady stream of fresh blood oi the right sort from without.""