It is easy to assert that as people cannot eat precious stones and metals, the things that are most beautiful and costly are less useful than corn and potatoes, and yet the human race for several thousand years has attached importance to the sands and rocks that have yielded diamonds in Golconda and Brazil and gold in California and Australia; and it is a record and tradition that the gold of California gave the nations of the earth "Californian good times," a phrase that was historical and an inspiration, and significant of the prosperity of the people of the generation that had its enjoyment. The diamond cannot be converted into food save by exchange, for the dust of the ground stone is rather imperishable than palatable and nourishing, but it is "a thing of beauty" that is "a joy forever;" and even if the prejudices of the Boers were inflamed against the most beautiful and enduring forms of value, that should not commend them as heroes of civilization; and it does not prove their Republicanism to refuse the rights of self-government to a people certainly among the most enlightened on the earth because they are in the majority in the great and flourishing communities, where they founded splendid cities, opened railroads and established a commerce additional to the world's wealth of more than one hundred millions of dollars a year. Whatever may be said to the contrary, these achievements should command the respect of all nations and peoples. [Sidenote: Antagonism to English Rule] The English speaking inhabitants of the gold and diamond country of Africa are treated as hostiles by the Boers who were the first settlers and slaughtered the natives, and the English are held out of favor because they are so numerous and prosperous, and, it may be added, so superior in their intelligence and elevated in their purposes and resolute in their determinations, that the Boers must keep them disarmed and deny them the ballot and all consideration in local affairs. The English offense is that they have made the country flourish, have built cities in deserts, spanned rivers and penetrated mountains with roads of steel. These improvements may be bad for the peculiar civilization and hardy endowments of the Boers, but do not seem to vindicate the belligerent rancher in his ferocious antagonism to those who are leading in their day and generation those affairs that are working out the betterment of the race of man. There are boundaries that must be removed for the broad benefits of the general welfare of mankind that the forces of the age may overcome the most stubborn resistance to the triumphant processes by which civilization spreads abroad and acquires stability.