166           A Staff Officeb's Scrap-Book
here; no extra efforts under the eye of the master or mistress. All have some share in the profits, and they all of them put their backs into what they have to do as if their very lives depended upon it. Energy is only half the battle; these men and women possess high individual intelligence to guide that energy. To be realised, their farming must be seen. Such furrows! Such promise of crops with each sprouting corn-stalk tended like a rose-bush in the garden of a duchess! And all this energy, strength and intellect available for about tuppence ha'penny per diem!
When the Russian officials saw this beautiful land, where even the mountain crests are being coaxed to bear crops ; where nothing is disorderly or wasted; where the tile-roofed farms peep out from their encircling orchards, each a peaceful picture of neatness and exceeding prosperity; when they saw all this, it seems strange that they could even have imagined the plan of bringing over their own feckless moujiks to farm side by side against such competitors. To court such proximity was obvious madness. But for how long is distance going to shield any of us ? Now that our poor little planet keeps shrinking, shrinking, beneath the embrace of electricity and steam, for how long is it going to remain large enough to admit of one man doing for shillings in one part of it what another man does for pennies in another part of it ? When I see a Chinaman mending a road or unloading rice bags with apparently twice the energy of the Western working man and for less than one-tenth of his pay, I wonder how it is all going to end ? We seem actually, like the Russians, pressing on to meet the danger. At  the  mines   of   the  Witwatersrand   all   artificial