The Boer has to the full the defects of his qualities; that scintillating intellectual brilliance and versatility, so common and so charming in the Frenchman and the Irishman, the Boer, even when highly cultured, seldom has: he is deep and strong rather than broad and brilliant: indomitable when he does act, it takes much to rouse him into action; he is slow and often heavy. And the Boer race has its Judases, as all other races have; nor do I know of a more sorrowful sight than the descendant of the old Boer, speaking English often with so foreign an accent as to be laughable, yet playing the part of the extreme Anglo-Saxon; losing thereby the charms of the Boer without attaining to the magnificent virtues which are characteristic of the best Englishman. But these persons are fortunately rare; and behind them lies the great, solid, self-respecting mass of the Dutch South African people. I do not appraise, as has been said, the Boer as higher or more valuable than other human varieties. A dogmatic statement as to the respective values of human varieties, or even of races, has always appeared to me, since I passed out of my infantile state of ignorance, as impossible. Each race has its virtues and the deficiencies which are complemental to its virtues, and the loss of any one race would be to me the falling of a star from the human galaxy. When one travels in Italy and sees its harmoniously featured people, and views that plastic art which the Italian alone has given the world in many of its noblest forms, and realizes the vast debt under which all the world rests to the Italian race for its influence on the fourteenth-century renaissance, and remembers the list of the mighty dead from Michael Angelo to Dante, one so considering the land and its people is inclined to say that it would be well to barter any folk to preserve Italy and her gifts to humanity. But when one crosses the Alps and enters quaint German villages with their simple folk and treads on the soil which was the birth-land of the Goethes and Kants and Beethovens and Luthers, who are the world's wealth as well as Germany's, when one considers that vast army of intellectual labourers who have made the name German synonymous with the search after knowledge and truth for truth's sake; when one walks through the Rhine provinces with their sunshine, their vines, and their music, and their stalwart men and fair-faced women, with their German truth of heart, then it may be forgiven one who has any German blood in his veins if he feels inclined to seize a flag as children do and walk about waving it and crying, "I am a German! This is my Fatherland!"