It may be questioned whether we, who have no such shadow hanging in the background, can ever fully realize all it signifies to those in whose existence it has place, however wide our sympathies. The man who suffers from some ancestral disease, be it consumption or gout, regards himself as an object for pity and interest, and may seek and find consolation in the sympathy of his fellows; but the man or woman who suffers from this imaginary ancestral stain must maintain a perfect and unbroken silence. To offer him sympathy would be an insult; to receive it he would feel a degradation. This aspect of the matter is all important because it throws a further light on that all-important question of the sociality or anti-sociality of crossing races in a country situated as is South Africa at present. It is clear that even in those instances in which no degradation or manifest anti-sociality on the part of descendants is the result of racial inter-breeding, and when, owing to education and happy surroundings, they become eventually some of the most cultured, valuable, and virtuous members of society; still, so great an amount of suffering is inflicted upon them and their descendants in societies constituted as ours are, that the original act which made possible their existence must be regarded as distinctly anti-social, though in this case the result has not been manifest human degradation, but merely unjustly inflicted and wholly unmerited human suffering. Fully recognizing that many persons of mingled descent are of remarkable and even unusual mental power, of high social feeling, and allowing that there is a possibility that in the ages to come, when the great people of South Africa shall be fully formed, that if there be in that great people an infusion of the blood of the African races, it is possible, that instead, as is usually supposed, of that great race being hopelessly degraded, and rendered inferior to other races, because of its infusion of African blood, it may by crossing with the dark and more undifferentiated African races, with their possibly less developed nervous systems, and heavier animality, receive an increase of hardihood and vitality, and a greater staying power, which may enable such a mingled race actually to go further in the race of life, than others not so mingled.