Strange things have happened in South Africa in the dozen years that have passed since the musketry crackled along the Modder and the Tugela, for the country that the world believed had been won for good and all by British arms is being slowly but surely rewon by Boer astuteness. Already the bonds which hold the new Union of South Africa to the British Empire have become very loose ones. The man who, as prime minister, is the virtual ruler of the young nation, is a far-sighted and sagacious Dutchman, while seven out of the eleven portfolios in his cabinet are held by men of the same race. The Union not only makes its own laws and fixes its own tariffs, but the leading Dutch organ of the country recently went so far as to urge that, in case Great Britain should become engaged in a European war, it would be possible and might be proper for South Africa to declare its neutrality and take no part in it. Not only is the white population of the Union overwhelmingly Dutch, but in many parts of the country English is becoming merely a subsidiary tongue, while it is not at all unlikely, in view of the bill recently passed by the Parliament making Dutch compulsory in the schools, that the language of the Netherlands will eventually become the predominant tongue throughout all South Africa. Most suggestive of all, perhaps, the Orange River Colony, upon entering the Union, promptly reverted to its old name of the Orange Free State, which it bore before the war with England. Indeed, it may sadly perplex the historians of the future to decide who won the Boer War. If South Africa is to become a union in fact as well as in name its people will have to face and solve the great national problems of race and colour. Of these, the former are, if not the more important, certainly the more pressing. Two of the four provinces of the Union, remember, are British solely by right of conquest; a third is bound by the closest ties of blood and tradition to the Dutch people; while only one of the four is British in sentiment and population. Many intelligent people with whom I talked, both in England and in Africa, assured me that the formation of the Union was the first step toward cutting the bonds which join South Africa to the mother country. While most Englishmen scoff at any such suggestion, swaggeringly asserting that they “have whipped the Dutch once and can do it again,” the Dutch retort, on the other hand, that it took England, with all her financial and military resources, four years, and cost her tens of thousands of lives and millions of pounds, to conquer the two little Boer republics, and that she would not have beaten them then if their money had held out. Though there is certainly no love lost between the English and the Boers, I think that the majority of the latter are convinced that it is to their own best interests to be loyal to the new government, in the direction of which they have, after all, the greatest say.