The loss of South Africa, or the failure to assert British supremacy as the Paramount Power in that region, would not only have humiliated Great Britain in the eyes of rival nations everywhere and precipitated peril wherever aggressive foreign ambition could find a desirable opening, but it would have lost her the respect, the admiration or the loyalty of rising British nations in Australia and Canada; of lesser Colonies all over the world; of swarming millions of uncivilized races in Hindostan, China and Northern Africa. Its influence would have been a shock to the commercial and financial nerves of the world; a blow to the independence and liberties of the "little peoples" who now rest securely under the real or nominal guarantee of British power. In the Persian Gulf and on the borders of Afghanistan, upon the frontiers of Siam and the shores of the Bosphorus, in the waters of Australasia and on the coasts of Newfoundland, upon the banks of the mighty Nile and along the borders of Canada, the result would have come as the most menacing storm-cloud of modern history. The power of a great race to continue its mission of colonization, civilization and construction was involved; and would be again involved if any future and serious European intervention were threatened. The origin of the question itself is too wide and complicated to treat of in a few brief words. To some superficial onlookers it has been a simple matter of dispute as to franchise regulations between President Kruger and Mr. Chamberlain. To the enemies of England it has been a wicked and heartless attempt on the part of Great Britain to seize a Naboth's vineyard of gold and territory. To a few Englishmen, even, it has seemed a product of capitalistic aggression or of the personal ambition of a Rhodes or a Chamberlain. To many more it has appeared as a direct consequence of the Gladstone policy of 1881 and 1884. In reality, however, it is the result of a hundred years of racial rivalry, during which the Boer character has been evolved out of intense isolation, deliberate ignorance and cultivated prejudice into the remarkable product of to-day, while the nature of his British neighbor has expanded in the light of liberty and through the gospel of equality, of labor and of world-wide thought, into the great modern representative of progress in all that makes for good government, active intellectual endeavor, material wealth and Imperial expansion.