uote the following from a brilliant pamphlet by Olive
Schreiner, who possesses a deeper insight into the true condition of
affairs in South Africa than has been vouchsafed to any other writer on
the same subject:--

[29] "We put it to all generous and just spirits, whether of statesmen
or thinkers, whether the little Republic does not deserve our
sympathy, which wise minds give to all who have to deal with new
and complex problems, where the past experience of humanity has
not marked out a path--and whether, if we touch the subject at
all, it is not necessary that it should be in that large
impartial, truth-seeking spirit in which humanity demands we
should approach all great social difficulties and questions?"

"It is sometimes said that when one stands looking down from the
edge of this hill at the great mining camp of Johannesburg
stretching beneath, with its heaps of white sand and _debris_
mountain high, its mining chimneys belching forth smoke, with its
seventy thousand Kaffirs and its eighty thousand men and women,
white or coloured, of all nationalities, gathered here in the
space of a few years on the spot where, fifteen years ago, the
Boer's son guided his sheep to the water and the Boer's wife sat
alone at evening at the house door to watch the sunset, we are
looking upon one of the most wonderful spectacles on earth. And
it is wonderful; but as we look at it the thought always arises
within us of something more wonderful yet--the marvellous manner
in which a little nation of simple folk, living in peace in the
land they loved, far from the rush of cities and the concourse of
men, have risen to the difficulties of their condition; how they,
without instruction in statecraft or traditionary rules of
policy, have risen to face their great difficulties, and have
sincerely endeavoured to meet them in a large spirit, and have
largely succeeded. Nothing but that curious and wonderful
instinct for statecraft and the organisation and arrangement of
new social conditions which seem inherent as a gift of the blood
to all those peoples who took their rise in the little deltas on
the north-east of the Continent of Europe where the English and
Dutch peoples alike took their rise could have made it possible.
We do not say that the Transvaal Republic has among