And we sit down and dig out the shells and flints with our fingers and the warm afternoon sunshine shimmers over us, as it did over some old first mother of humanity when she sat there cracking shells. And we touch with our hands the old race days, that at other times are hardly realizable by us. For us it is easy to feel all this. It is easier yet for the fair European woman, as she lounges in her drawing-room in Europe, to regard as very heinous the conduct of men and women who destroyed and hated a race of small aborigines. But if, from behind some tapestry-covered armchair in the corner, a small, wizened, yellow face were to look out now, and a little naked arm guided an arrow, tipped with barbed bone dipped in poison, at her heart, the cry of the human preserving itself would surely arise; Jeames would be called up, the policeman with his baton would appear, and if there were a pistol in the house, it would be called into requisition! The little prehistoric record would lie dead upon the Persian carpet. To indulge in philanthropic sentiment is a luxury easily to be enjoyed by the idle and luxurious; to share in generous action towards weaker peoples is a possibility only to those who have sternly set out on the path of self-obliteration; and he who indulges most of the first knows sometimes least of the last. When the fore-trekker mother lay awake at night in her wagon with her baby at her breast, she listened with strained intensity to hear if there were not a stealthy step approaching, or for the sound of the loosening of the oxen tied to the wagon, on whose continued possession the lives of her husband and children depended. When the children went out to play during the day, she bade them anxiously to keep near at hand; and as she sat alone in the heat when her husband had gone out hunting, she scanned the kopjes to see if there were not a little dark figure moving on them. To her he was no record of the past, but an awful actuality of the present; and the stern pressure of the primitive necessities of life, which in their extremest form have impelled civilized, shipwrecked men, when starving, to feed on each other's flesh, stepped in and made brotherly love impossible. The Boer fought hard and the Bushman hard; they gave and they asked no quarter; neither can I see that we have any reason to be ashamed of either of our South Africans. St. Francis of Assisi preached to the little fishes: we eat them. But the man who eats fish can hardly be blamed, seeing that the eating of fishes is all but universal among the human race!--if only he does not pretend that while he eats he preaches to them! This has never been the Boer's attitude towards any aboriginal race. He may consume it off the face of the earth; but he has never told it he does it for its benefit. He talks no cant.