difficulty to locomotion is met with. The coach-drivers and transport riders are, however, wonderfully skilful in handling their teams, and it is certainly marvellous that so few accidents occur. From Figtree to Bulawayo, thirty miles, the road is comparatively good.

The real question in Rhodesia, as I have pointed out before, for the next year will not be the native question so much as this question of transport and food supply, and this problem remains for the Chartered Company to solve. How can they induce the white population to remain in Bulawayo and Southern Rhodesia, when food-stuffs are at such prohibitive prices, and when there is no work to do, all trades being at a standstill? Naturally no sane individual or wisely managed company is at present building houses, or continuing operations of any sort on a large scale, with prices as they are, knowing that the advent of the railway means cheaper material, cheaper labour, and immunity from native risings. Artisans who were earning 1l. a day have now no work, the constructive trades having ceased, and these men are naturally leaving the country. When I was in Bulawayo in May of this year eggs were 40s. or 50s. a dozen, tins of condensed milk were sold for 78. 6d. each-strong buyers, as the Stock Exchange would say and enough bread for breakfast for one cost a shilling. So long as wages were high and regular high prices were willingly paid, but now, except a man is in the Chartered Company's employ, his chance of work is distinctly poor. For the moment fighting at 108. a day and rations is the best trade, and there are plenty of volunteers at that price. Now that Lord Grey and Mr. Rhodes have settled that 5s. a day and rations is ample pay we hear that great dissatisfaction is expressed, and that numbers are leaving the country in consequence. But when the war is over then will come the real pinch, and, unless a system of gratuitous State maintenance is them established at the cost of the Chartered Company, an exodus of the majority of the population must take place. Until, therefore, the railway reaches Bulawayo there can be no real progress in Southern Rhodesia, either in regard to mining, commerce, or agriculture, and no one realises, I feel sure, that a vigorous railway policy is the only solution of the present difficulties more than Mr. Rhodes himself.

Many people will be also tempted to ask, Why is it that Mr. Rhodes, with his wonderful foresight in other directions, has not before now made a point of accelerating the construction of the railway? The Vryburg-Mafeking section was opened in October 1894, and here we are in August 1896, and only another fifty miles is absolutely working-and that only half ballasted-as far as Rabatse. If only a small portion of the money spent in mining, development, and housebuilding in Rhodesia had been spent upon railway construction Rhodesia to-day would probably not have been suffering from a native rebellion, would have been comparatively well stocked with food for man and beast, and would also have undoubtedly possessed two or three times as many white inhabitants. It is difficult to imagine what

can have been the reason of this delay, for the Beira railway was stagnant at the same time, and even if it is true, as is reported, that Mr. Rhodes and the Chartered Company had special reasons for favouring the Beira route, as against the Mafeking route, there is no excuse why, in that case, the Beira line should not have been completed, at any rate as far as Salisbury. Another curious feature is observable. In the United States, and in all other parts of the world where a railway is used as a civilising and developing factor outside any commercial value, the railway precedes the population, and the population afterwards agglomerates round the railway. Where the line crosses streams or fertile valleys, spots particularly attractive to the human eye or convenient for trade, towns spring up. But in Rhodesia the opposite seems to be the case. Take the case of Umtali. Nothing can be stranger than shifting a whole township, and giving the population compensation for disturbances, in order to avoid taking the railline out of its direct course and over a somewhat severe gradient. Surely in Rhodesia too the railway, even if it does not precede, ought at least to accompany and not follow the incoming population. The delay in pushing on the railway will have proved extremely costly to the Chartered Company and the nation. The Chartered Board must now have realised the supreme importance of the railway, for we learn that it is going to give a bonus to the contractor of 2001. for every mile completed in a day.

way

However, Mr. Rhodes is not the man to be discouraged when the outlook appears bad and possible famine seems to stare the white and black population alike in the face. His personality is worth more, for the moment, in this crisis in Rhodesia, than the agricultural or mineral wealth of the whole country. Rhodesia might to-day be well called 'Rhodes, Unlimited.'

It is true that Mr. Rhodes has no longer any official position with the Chartered Company. But just as a diamond removed from its setting is a diamond still, so Rhodes, whether in the position of Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, or Managing Director of the Chartered Company, or as an individual, is Rhodes still. The same brain, heart, and vigour remain-the rest is as nothing, a mere official halo.

All Nature has striven against him, and large masses of mankind— drought, locusts, pestilences, and famines on the one side, raids, revolutions, and revelations on the other. Should he emerge, as I believe he will, successfully from these troubles, he will have won, and practically won alone, by his own exertions, a country seven times the size of the United Kingdom in the face of Nature and man.

In this case of Nature v. the Chartered Company and Rhodes, even though the trial last a year more, and to-day the odds be on the plaintiff, the result will to a certainty be a verdict in favour of the defendants.

JOHN SCOTT MONTAGU.

1896

THE BATTLE OF THE STANDARDS

IN AMERICA

I

WAR TO THE KNIFE

THE optimism of the American people blinds them to the approach of any great political crisis until it is close at hand. Up to the very hour when the Secessionists fired on Fort Sumter, the Northern press ridiculed the possibility of civil war. It was conceded that there were a few fanatics in the South who clamoured for secession, and a few fanatics in the North who would welcome civil war, but that the South would secede, and the North fight, was thought to be incredible. But in the flash of the guns of Charleston harbour it was suddenly seen that the whole South was united in defence of the right of secession, and that the North was unanimous in the determination that secession should be crushed on the battlefield.

Two months before the Democratic Convention met last July, the Eastern States fancied that the movement in behalf of free silver coinage was of small importance, and that there was not the slightest danger that the Silverites could triumph in a national election. Today it is apparent that the silver craze has seized upon the entire West and South, and is spreading with ominous rapidity even in the East. As the North was blind to the danger of secession, so the American people have been blind to the steadily growing danger that the Federal Government may, at no distant day, fall into the hands of the Silverites, and that the Eastern States will then be compelled to choose between utter ruin and withdrawal from the Union.

In the early days of the Southern rebellion, an eminent Democratic leader, one of the few Americans of the period who had a right to be ranked as a statesman, said, in the course of a confidential conversation, that the East had signed its death warrant by joining with the West to crush the South. 'When the war is over,' said he, 'the West will dominate the Union. It will rapidly grow in population and power, while the East will remain stationary. In a few years the East will be powerless, and the crazy financial legislation which the ignorance and arrogance of the West is certain to bring

about, will make it necessary for the East to accept bankruptcy or civil war.' The speaker was not in the slightest degree in sympathy with the Southern secessionists, and had supported to the best of his ability the Lincoln Government. Nevertheless, he saw that the East had missed its one great opportunity by not following the example of the South, and withdrawing from the shattered Union. A little more than thirty-four years have passed since he made this prediction, and the time of its fulfilment draws near.

The average Western American is a man of unbounded energy, unbounded self-conceit, and unbounded ignorance. The ignorance of the Western man is not the natural ignorance of the Calabrian peasant. The latter can neither read nor write, and he knows nothing except what passes before his eyes in his little mountain village, but with this ignorance there is the humility that accepts the superiority and welcomes the leadership of intelligent men. The ignorance of the Western American is an artificial and acquired ignorance. He absorbs it from the newspapers which form his only reading. These not only teach him the most absurdly false doctrines in matters of political economy and finance, but they also flatter his vanity, and convince him that he is infinitely superior to the men of the effete East. He firmly believes that if the East advocates a revenue tariff and a gold standard, it is because of the influence of British teachings and of British bribery. The West, in its own opinion, has the only true, the only American political gospel, and its mission is to impose it not only on the East but on the world. It is to the ignorant West that the United States owe the Greenback folly, the Protectionist delusion, and the silver craze.

Soon after the civil war was ended, the West made the discovery that an unlimited and irredeemable paper currency was the panacea for all public and private woes. For a time the 'Greenback craze," as it was called, threatened the American Republic much as the silver craze threatens it to-day. Fortunately, the West had then nothing like the strength that it has to-day, and the efforts of the East to maintain an honest currency were successful. Both the great political parties saw themselves compelled to take firm ground against the Greenback movement, although the Democratic party had at one time showed a disposition to attract Gree back votes by framing platforms that could be interpreted in favour of either honest or dishonest currency. The failure of the Greenback movement was, however, due solely to the fact that the centre of pop alation had not yet shifted so far westward as to make it possible to e ect a president without the votes of the two great Eastern States- New York and Pennsylvania. That change has now taken place, and a president can be elected even if he loses both New York and Pnnsylvania.

It was natural that a community capable of bel eving that the fiat of the government could make an irredeemal le paper dollar

worth as much as a gold dollar, should accept the doctrine of the Protectionist, that the American who pays two dollars for a home-made blanket instead of one dollar for an imported blanket is on the high road to wealth. The West is to a large extent an agricultural community, and as such Protection had nothing to offer it except an immense increase of the cost of living. The Western farmer had everything to lose and nothing to gain by Protection, but nevertheless he voted blindly for it, and fastened the McKinley tariff on his back. It is true that there are Protectionists in the Eastern States, but they are certainly in a minority. The strength of Protection lies in the West, and it was by Western votes that it was forced upon the country.

In its beginning, the silver heresy took the shape of a demand for bimetallic currency. It owed its origin to the discovery of large silver mines in certain of the far Western States. Its chief promoters were the mine owners, who sought a market for their silver, but it soon enlisted the support of all who had formerly demanded cheap money' in the shape of greenbacks. The silver party was at first confined almost wholly to the West, but it soon enlisted adherents in the South. Its progress was watched with languid interest by the East, where it was believed to be only a weak echo of the greenback movement. It achieved its greatest victory in the passage of the Sherman Law, which provided that the Government should coin every month a certain quantity of silver dollars. In spite of the verbiage with which the Sherman Law was clothed, it meant simply that the Government should be compelled to buy a fixed quantity of silver annually, and pay for it in gold at a price far above its true value. The inevitable result of such a law might easily have been foreseen, but, inasmuch as the purchased silver remained in the vaults of the Federal Treasury, for the very sufficient reason that no creditor would accept it in the place of gold, the people of the East flattered themselves that it would do no harm, and trusted that it would satisfy the Silverites. Of course it brought about the steady depreciation of the price of silver, and the steady flow of gold to other countries, while the Silverites, so far from being satisfied with the Law, were encouraged to demand the free and unlimited coinage of silver. The heresy infects both the great political parties in the West, and there are to-day nearly as many Western Republicans who are in favour of free silver, as there are Western silver Democrats. The recent Republican Convention, knowing that in any event the South was certain to remain Democratic, and that no Republican candidate could possibly be elected without the nearly unanimous support of the East, wisely placed itself fully and fairly on the side of honest money, and for the moment the Eastern people fancied that an overwhelming Republican victory had been thereby made certain. It was not until the Democratic Convention