they had trekked from the British Government with its officials and its missionaries and its laws that made a black man as good as his master, and had trekked into a continent, dangerous and trackless, where wild beasts and savage men, and grim waterless plains, had given way before their fierce will to be separate and survive. Then out of the harsh world of rock and stone they had come to the grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names of peace and thankfulness. They had built their homes and their churches; and as God had chosen them for a people, so did they choose him for their God, cherishing their separateness that was now his Will. They set their conquered enemies apart, ruling them with unsmiling justice, declaring “no equality in Church or State,” and making the iron law that no white man might touch a black woman, nor might any white woman be touched by a black man. This is a patriarchal society, ruled by men such as Jakob Van Vlaanderen, a political leader who privately calls the members of Parliament “his span of oxen.” Fiercely nationalistic, they hate the British, and as they fought them so they fight any force, even a sociological one, which threatens their hard-won supremacy. In the Union of South Africa there are willing British subjects and British sympathizers, but they have not been represented by a group of novels as fine as these of Paton’s. This is perhaps due to the fact that they do not form so homogeneous a cultural and ethnic group as do the Boers and their descendants. For another thing, the political star of the Boers has been in the ascendant in the past few decades, while that of the pro-British has seemed about to set as it did in India. GERMANY: A SELF-PORTRAIT