quality, none
claiming any social pre-eminence, and none, so far as I could learn,
attempting to interfere in politics. Both the bishops and the clergy of
the Church of England (among whom there are many gifted men) are, with
few exceptions, of marked High-church proclivities, which, however, do
not appear to prevail equally among the laity. The Dutch Reformed Church
has been troubled by doubts as to the orthodoxy of many of its younger
pastors who have been educated at Leyden or Utrecht, and for a time it
preferred to send candidates for the ministry to be trained at
Edinburgh, whose theological schools inspired less distrust. It is
itself in its turn distrusted, apparently without reason, by the still
more rigid Calvinists of the Transvaal.

One curious feature of South African society remains to be mentioned,
which impressed me the more the longer I remained in the country. The
upper stratum of that society, consisting of the well-to-do and best
educated people, is naturally small, because the whole white population
of the towns is small, there being only four towns that have more than
ten thousand white residents. But this little society is virtually one
society, though dispersed in spots hundreds of miles from one another.
Natal stands rather apart, and has very little to do either socially or
in the way of business with Cape Colony, and not a great deal even with
the Transvaal. So too the four or five towns of the eastern province of
Cape Colony form a group somewhat detached, and though the "best people"
in each of them know all about the "best people" in Cape Town, they are
not in close touch with the latter. But Cape Town, Kimberley,
Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, the five most important places
(excluding the Natal towns), are for social purposes almost one city,
though it is six hundred and fifty miles from Cape Town to Kimberley,
and one thousand miles from Cape Town to Johannesburg. All the persons
of consequence in these places know one another and follow one another's
doings. All mix frequently, because the Cape Town people are apt to be
called by business to the inland cities, and the residents of the inland
cities come to Cape Town for sea air in the summer, or to embark thence
for Europe. Where distances are great, men think little of long
journeys, and the fact that Cape Town is practically the one port of
entrance and departure for the interior, so far as passengers are
concerned, keeps it