The population of South Africa has been formed by a series of migrations, all of them, if we except the prehistoric wanderings of the Bushmen and Hottentots, within recent times. The Native Africans came down from the central lakes within recent ‘saga’ memory. Their genealogies do not, of course, give dates. But probably 400 years covers the main movement. Among them came the invading Dutch and British. Other European races and, in large numbers, the Jewish people followed. There is a considerable number of Greeks and Syrians who, especially the latter but even to some extent the former, occupy a borderline position on the edge of the South African concept of ‘European’. Into this mixture large numbers of Indians and Malays, and a small number of Chinese, were imported.

It would take many thousand words to describe the mere categorisation of South African population, in which Natives, Coloureds, Asiatics and Europeans have each a separate position, and each their sub-divisions. So all that can be done for the purpose of this article, which is to give South African illustrations of the social-moral effects of movement of population, is to take certain special points of interest and let the many-sided background suggest itself in dealing with them.

To begin with, South Africa has no deported populations, no physically crossed immigrants. The only people who might be so called are the Jews, who are in a sense involuntary immigrants wherever they are. But their condition in South Africa is not sufficiently different from elsewhere to be of special interest.

Immigrants and persons of recent immigrant stock are more quickly assimilated in American small towns than in cities for at least one quite evident reason. The size and complex organisation of the city allow immigrants to group together and continue in the practice of their folkways. Almost any American city of sufficient size has a number of ‘sections’—Italian, Hungarian, Polish, or other—the inhabitants of which continue to whatever extent is practicable the language, social customs, and even diet of their homelands. In the small town there do not exist the facilities for special ethnic ghettoes of this kind, and the person of foreign origin is compelled to make an adaptation to American ways of doing things simply as a matter of survival. In the ‘foreign sections’ of even small cities one will find persons who came in with the last great wave of immigration in the early 1900’s who still do not speak English—they live in a species of Limbo, without particular allegiance to their place of origin as a political and national entity, and enjoy only an economic nexus with their country of adoption. There is the classic story of the Chinaman who settled in the Polish quarter of Chicago and opened a laundry. After three years he felt that he had sufficiently mastered English to go on a sightseeing tour of the city. When he left his familiar neighbourhood he found that what he spoke was good idiomatic Polish.

The ‘numbering’ of people used to be resented in ancient times as presumptuous, unlucky and only meant as a means of further fiscal extortion. The taking of a census for purely scientific, demographic purposes is something quite modern and goes back to the ‘counting of heads’, required by democracy, practised for the first time in 1790 by the United States; Great Britain following suit with a first census in 1801. Subsequently most other countries have likewise introduced the system of a decennial census; but there are important exceptions still, the most serious one being that of China, which is quite innocent of any reliable nation-wide statistics of any sort.

To say anything about China’s population one is therefore left to shrewd guesses, scientific approximations or a lively imagination. The Imperial Government ordered a census to be taken in 1895 and 1910, which yielded a total of 377 and 316 million inhabitants respectively. The Republic, if only on account of the endemic warfare which has bedevilled its existence from the very start, has had to content itself with ‘Post Office Estimates’, which in 1920 suggested 428 and in 1930 445 millions as China’s total population. Finally in 1932 the Government came out with a fiat declaring 475 millions to be the right figure; against which W. F. Wilcox of the American Statistical Association in its Journal for 1980 maintained that 342 millions was the most he could concede.

C. P. Fitzgerald by a painstaking computation of cities actually occupied at different periods of Chinese history arrived at a grand total of 130 millions as China’s population under the T’ang Dynasty in 618 A.D. (China Journal of 1932).

It is gradually becoming possible to assess the figures concerning the expulsion of Germans from the eastern parts of Europe, from Eastern Germany, Sudetenland, Hungary, Rumania, Jugoslavia and adjacent countries. Each new figure implies a larger, more extensive, more irreparable sum of human misery; and means, moreover, an accumulation of new problems in almost every field of human relations, the full size of which is quite obviously not yet realised anywhere.

The latest figures are as follows. Those expelled number altogether about 11 millions, of whom approximately half, 5 1/2 millions, are Catholic. In the American Zone there are now 3 1/4 millions, in the British Zone 3 1/3 millions, in the Russian Zone 4 1/2 millions, and about 100,000 in the French Zone. It is assumed that about 3 million people died in consequence of the expulsion; these are not included in the above-mentioned total of 11 million. Out of a total of 4,500 Catholic priests who worked among these people only 2,500 are still alive. Only 15 per cent of those expelled had the opportunity of taking enough of their belongings with them in order to have a minimum of clothing, furniture and outfit of any type.

Symptomatic cures are rarely effective. Satisfactory treatment, medical or political, demands a knowledge of causes, as well as symptoms. So long as the cause is unknown, remedies are futile. Yet the Western Allies are striving to impose just such a symptomatic cure for Nazism, without ever investigating its causes; that, perhaps, is all political action can do. But to dismiss Nazism, in theory and practice, as a policy of anti-Semitism, concentration camps, imperialism, militarism and compulsory sterilisation, is not enough; all those abuses may be eradicated by A.M.G., but they are merely the symptoms, just as unemployment and degradation were merely the occasions, of Hitler’s revolution. The inherent disposition to Nazism will remain until its causes are diagnosed and treated. The writer believes this inherent disposition to come from tendencies engendered or encouraged by Luther, when he denied Natural Morality, and rejected the claims of the Church; without that rebellion, Nazism might never have occurred.

I do not enjoy making such bold assertions;. I should be glad to see them disproved; but there is no virtue in concealing the truth. Let me not be misunderstood, however. No one would make Luther a champion of Dachau and Buchenwald; one might as readily accuse George Washington of defending the atomic bomb; but Luther suffered from having disciples. In fact, only a chemist can detect the affinity between coal and diamonds, but none the less it is there; so with Luther and the disposition to Nazism.