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 brought about--entered into the possession of the
Transvaal and organised the long-talked-of Union of South Africa, the
country started a normal existence free from the unhealthy symptoms which
had hindered its progress. It became a useful member of the vast British
Empire, as well as a prosperous country enjoying a good government, and
launched itself upon a career it could never have entered upon but for the
war. Destructive as it was, the Boer campaign was not a war of
annihilation. On the contrary, without it it would have been impossible
for the vast South African territories to become federated into a Union of
its own and at the same time to take her place as a member of another
Empire from which it derived its prosperity and its welfare. The grandeur