It would be a last counsel of despair if we let this outbreak of crime turn us against the native peoples. It is we and they together who must quell it. Alone we never shall.
We wish we could find some kind of magic education that would teach natives to want to obey the law, and to want nothing else. There is no such education. Men obey the law when they are pursuing worthy goals, working for some good purpose, making the most of their seventy years, using their gifts.
It is these gifts of which we are afraid. And as long as we fear them we shall be at the mercy of other more terrible gifts, developed in the school of poverty, ignorance, and cunning. We have to choose between a purposeful, self-respecting, industrious and law-abiding native community and a shiftless, corrupt, idle, lawless community. It is because we do not make up our minds that things go from bad to worse.
Dingaan's Day [which commemorates the victory of the Boers, led by Pretorious, over the Zulus, led by Dingaan, at Blood River on December 16, 1838] is near, when we commemorate the triumph of civilization over barbarism. Do we mean a military or a spiritual triumph? If we mean a spiritual triumph — and I am sure many of us do — why don't we really make up our minds to civilize all the people of South Africa? I believe we could go to it with a new spirit, and that many of the fears and doubts that so poison the springs of action would disappear. Men would walk with a lighter step and a clearer conscience; they would face with greater courage the problems they contemplate today with gloom and lack of faith. That there are dangers we all know. But what could be worse than the way we are living now?
