For the first time in my life I was really looking at the social fundamental of .  
There is something astonishingly naïve in the unconsciousness with which people of our class float over the great economic realities. All my life I had been hearing of the Working Classes, of Industrialism, of Labor Problems and the Organization of Labor; but it was only now in South Africa, in this , crude period of putting a smashed and social order together again, that I perceived these familiar phrases represented something—something stupendously real. There were, I began to recognize, two sides to civilization; one traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the side I had been seeing and restoring; and there was another, ancient, too, but never universal, as old at least as the mines of Syracuse and the building of the pyramids, the side that came into view when I emerged from the dusty station and sighted the and slender chimneys of Johannesburg, that side of social life, that accumulation of toilers divorced from the soil, which is Industrialism and Labor and which carries such people as ourselves, and whatever significance and possibilities we have, as an elephant carries its rider.
 
Now all Johannesburg and Pretoria were discussing Labor and nothing but Labor. Bloemfontein was in conference thereon. Our work of which had so large on the southernward veld became here a business at once incidental and remote. One felt that a little sooner or a little later all that would resume and go on, as the rains would, and the veld-grass. But this was something less kindred to the succession of the seasons and the soil. This was a in the upper . Here in the great ugly mine-scarred basin of the Rand, with its bare hillsides, half the stamps were idle, was eating its head off, time and water were running to waste amidst an immense disputation. Something had given way. The war had spoilt the Kaffir "boy," he was demanding enormous wages, he was away from Johannesburg, and above all, he would no longer "go underground."
 
in all the argument and suggestion about me was this profoundly suggestive fact that some people,[Pg 121] quite a lot of people, scores of thousands, had to "go underground." Implicit too always in the was the assumption that the talker or writer in question wasn't for a moment to be expected to go there. Those others, whoever they were, had to do that for us. Before the war it had been the artless Kaffir, but he ! was being diverted to open-air employment at Delagoa Bay. Should we raise wages and go on with the fatal process of "spoiling the workers," should we by a tremendous hut-tax drive the Kaffir into our , should we carry the labor hunt across the Zambesi into Central Africa, should we follow the lead of Lord Kitchener and Mr. Creswell and employ the rather dangerous unskilled white labor (with "ideas" about strikes and socialism) that had drifted into Johannesburg, should we do tremendous things with labor-saving machinery, or were we indeed (desperate yet resort!) to bring in the cheap Indian or Chinese coolie?
 
things were drifting towards that last tremendous experiment. There was a vigorous in South Africa and in England (growing there to an outcry), but behind that proposal was the one vitalizing conviction in modern initiative:—indisputably it would pay, it would pay!...
 
The human mind has a much more complex and fluctuating process than most of those explanatory people who write about woul............