Nor is it probable that South Africa has lost by this return to a condition of almost primitive simplicity on the part of a section of her white inhabitants. As it is necessary that the artist or thinker who is to instruct mankind should not live too far from the unmodified life of nature, if he is to accomplish work that shall have in it the deathless elements of truth and virility; so it seems to be a law of existence that the most dominant and powerful races, if they desire to keep their virility, cannot remove themselves too far and too long from the primitive conditions of life. As the great individual is seldom found more than three generations removed from ancestors who wrought with their hands and lived in the open air, so the most powerful races seldom survive more than a few centuries of the enervation of an artificial life. As the physical body becomes toneless and weakened, so also the intellectual life grows thin; and it is as necessary for the nation, as for the individual who would recuperate, to return again and again, and, lying flat on the bosom of our common mother, to suck direct from the breast of nature the milk of life, which, drawn through long artificial channels, tends to become thin and ceases to nourish. Most great conquering peoples have been within hail of the nomads' encampment; and all great nations at the time when they have attained their greatness were largely agricultural or pastoral. The city kills. (It is, of course, hardly necessary to state that we have no intention of signifying that vast cities or the civilization which they represent have any instantaneous effect on national life, and still less that statistical tables would prove the death-rate higher in the town than country. These things have no bearing on the decline and fall of nations, which must slowly and gradually decay from within before the moment of their catastrophic fall can arrive. It is this decay which is promoted by the artificial conditions of life in that high condition of material civilization, of which vast cities, with their abject squalor, their squandered wealth, and their wide departure from the natural conditions of life, are at once the symptom and the cause; and it is a vulgar commonplace, that were the city not recruited from the more primitive country it would be depopulated in six generations. Vast and gorgeous cities have always heralded and accompanied the falls of great peoples; and the ruins of Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and the vast fallen cities of India and Greece, are the graves under which a brave, simple, and mighty people were buried while the walls yet stood. It would be almost as rational to inquire in the case of a man habitually over-eating and drinking himself, and who, taking no exercise, dies at fifty of gout and diseased liver, what hour of inaction, or which mouthful of meat or drink was it which produced his death, as to assert that because no detail of a given system of civilization is directly