English history. Begun through purely mercenary motives, it yet acquired a
character of grandeur which, as time went on, divested it of all sordid
and unworthy suspicions. South Africa has certainly been the land of
adventurers, and many of them found there either fame or disgrace,
unheard-of riches or the most abject poverty, power or humiliation. At the
same time the Colony has had amongst its rulers statesmen of unblemished
reputation and high honour, administrators of rare integrity, and men who
saw beyond the fleeting interests of the hour into the far more important
vista of the future.

When President Kruger was at its head the Transvaal Republic would have
crumbled under the intrigues of some of its own citizens. The lust for
riches which followed upon the discovery of the goldfields had, too, a
drastic effect. The Transvaal was bound to fall into the hands of someone,
and to be that Someone fell to the lot of England. This was a kindly throw
of Fate, because England alone could administer all the wealth of the
region without its becoming a danger, not only to the community at large,
but also to the Transvaalers.

That this is so can be proved by the eloquence of facts rather than by
words. It is sufficient to look upon what South Africa was twenty-five
years ago, and upon what it has become since under the protection of
British rule, to be convinced of the truth of my assertion. From a land of
perennial unrest and perpetual strife it has been transformed into a
prosperous and quiet colony, absorbed only in the thought of its economic
and commercial progress. Its population, which twenty years ago was
wasting its time and energy in useless wrangles, stands to-day united to
the Mother Country and absorbed by the sole thought of how best to prove
its devotion.

The Boer War has still some curious issues of which no notice has been
taken by the public at large. One of the principal, perhaps indeed the
most important of these, is that, though brought about by material
ambitions of certain people, it ended by being fought against these very
same people, and that its conclusion eliminated them from public life
instead of adding to their influence and their power. The result is
certainly a strange and an interesting one, but it is easily explained if
one takes into account the fact that once England as a nation--and not as
_the_ nation to which belonged the handful of adventurers through whose
intrigues the war was