the federal structure of the American, Canadian, and other systems of
similar historical ground. It represents a reversion from the idea of
State rights, and balanced indestructible powers and an attempt at
organic union by which the constituent parts are to be more and more
merged in the consolidated political unit which they combine to form.

But the Union and its making are of great interest also for the general
student of politics and history, concerned rather with the development
of a nationality than with the niceties of constitutional law. From
this point of view the Union comes as the close of a century of strife,
as the aftermath of a great war, and indicates the consummation, for
the first time in history, of what appears as a solid basis of harmony
between the two races in South Africa. In one shape or other union has
always been the goal of South-African aspiration. It was "Union" which
the "prancing proconsuls" of an earlier time--the Freres, the
Shepstones, and the Lanyons--tried to force upon the Dutch. A united
Africa was at once the dream of a Rhodes and (perhaps) the ambition of
a Kruger. It is necessary to appreciate the strength of this desire for
union on the part of both races and the intense South-African
patriotism in which it rests in order to understand how the different
sections and races of a country so recently locked in the
death-struggle of a three years' war could be brought so rapidly into
harmonious concert.

The point is well illustrated by looking at the composition of the
convention, which, in its sessions at Durban, Cape Town, and
Bloemfontein, put together the present constitution. South Africa, from
its troubled history, has proved itself a land of strong men. But it
was reserved for the recent convention to bring together within the
compass of a single council-room the surviving leaders of the period of