The nomadic population of Johannesburg undoubtedly consists of men who are brave and loyal citizens in their own States and nations. To-morrow, IF AMERICA WERE IN DANGER, probably almost every American citizen would troop back to her bosom, and spend not only life, but the wealth he had gained in South Africa from South African soil, in defending her. Every German would go home to the Fatherland; every Englishman, every Frenchman, would, as all brave men in the world’s history have done, when the cry arises, “The birth-land in danger!” The few Spaniards here trooped back to Spain as soon as the news of war arrived. One of the most brilliant and able of English journalists (a man whose opinion on any subject touching his own land we would receive almost with the reverence accruing to the man who speaks of a subject he knows well and has studied with superior abilities; but who had been only a few months in our land, and, therefore, had not full grasp of either our people or our problems, which from their complexity and many-sidedness are subjects for a life’s devotion) that man, three and a half years ago, when brave little Jameson--brave, however mistaken--was sent in to capture the mines of Johannesburg for his master, and when the great mixed population of Johannesburg, Germans and French, English and Jews, Arabs and Chinamen, refused to arise and go to aid him, and when hundreds of Englishmen, Cornishmen and others fled from Johannesburg, fearing that Jameson might arrive and cause a disturbance--said that Johannesburg would be known forever in history by the name of _Judasburg!_ and that the Cornish and other Englishmen who fled from the place were poltroons and cowards. But he was mistaken. JOHANNESBURG IS NOT JUDASBURG, and the Englishmen who fled were not poltroons. There ran in them blood as brave as any in England, and if to-morrow a hostile force attacked their birth-land, those very Cornish miners and English working men would die in the last ditch defending their land. Those men were strangers here; they came to earn the bread they could with difficulty win in their own land; they were friendly treated by South Africa and made money here; but were they bound to die in a foreign land for causes which they neither knew nor cared for? One thing only can possibly justify war and the destruction of our fellows to the enlightened and humane denizen of the nineteenth century; the unavoidable conviction that by no other means can we preserve our own life and freedom from a stronger power, or defend a weaker state or individual from a stronger. Nothing can even palliate it but so intense a conviction of a right so great to be maintained that we are willing, not merely to hire other men to fight and die for us, but to risk our own lives, A LIFE FOR A LIFE.