If the Angel of Death should spread his wings across the land and strike dead in one night every man and woman and child of either the Dutch or the English blood, leaving the other alive, the land would be a land of mourning. There would be not one household nor the heart of an African born man or woman that would not be weary with grief. We should weep the friends of our childhood, the companions of our early life, our grandchildren, our kindred, the souls who have loved us and whom we have loved. In destroying the one race he would have isolated the other. Time, the great healer of all differences, is blending us into a great mutual people, and love is moving faster than time. It is no growing hatred between Dutch and English South African born men and women that calls for war. On the lips of our babes we salute both races daily. Then we look round through the political world, and we ask ourselves: What great and terrible and sudden crime has been committed, what reckless slaughter and torture of the innocents, that blood can alone wash out blood? And we find none. And still we look, asking what great and terrible difference has suddenly arisen, so mighty that the human intellect cannot solve it by means of peace, that the highest and noblest diplomacy falls powerless before it, and the wisdom and justice of humanity cannot reach it, save by the mother’s drawing a sword and planting it in the heart of the daughter? We can find none. And again, we ask ourselves WHO GAINS BY WAR? What is it for? Who is there that desires it? Do men shed streams of human blood as children cut off poppy-heads to see the white juice flow? WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not England! She has a great young nation’s heart to lose. She has a cable of fellowship which stretches across the seas to rupture. She has treaties to violate. She has the great traditions of her past to part with. Whoever plays to win, she loses. WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not Africa! The great young nation, quickening to-day to its first consciousness of life, to be torn and rent, and bear upon its limb, into its fully ripened manhood, the marks of the wounds--wounds from a mother’s hands! WHO GAINS BY WAR? Not the great woman whose eighty years to-night completes,[C] who would carry with her to her grave the remembrance of the longest reign and the purest; who would have that when the nations gather round her bier, the whisper should go round, “That was a mother’s hand; it struck no child.” WHO GAINS BY WAR?