Christianity and enlightenment, when he means exploitation and destruction, that he belongs to a race thousands of whose men and women do sincerely desire those things which he affects? When the great Jew raised over his native city his mighty cry of--"O Jerusalem"--was it not proved by that very cry itself that sons of light were born even in her degenerate bosom? Was it not something that she gave birth to the prophets whom she killed and stoned? It may be allowed any man who has English blood in his veins to feel that he can never fall in the gulf of insincerity and egoism but he shall have millions of his fellow countrymen about him, but also that there are no heights of sincerity and humanity towards which he may aspire which thousands of his race have not attained; that he belongs to a branch of the human race which, if it has given birth to some of the most sordid and crumpled of human blooms, has also borne on it the fairest of fruit. Even if one turn to the despised African races, one finds, with much that is immature and childlike, much that is gracious and charming. That very strength of social instinct which characterises so many of them, to whom the social organism is all, the individual composing it so little, far removed as it is from our individualized Northern standpoint, may it not yet have its aspects of value and its lessons for humanity? The very Bushman, so little socialized, and standing almost on the border-line between the creature that speaks whom we call man and the creature that thinks and feels without speaking whom we call beast, that he has something of the attraction of both, would we be without him? And may one not well be glad one was not born so late in the order of life that one never saw him? And one who has not personally known the Jap, the Chinaman, the Indian, the Afghan, the Spaniard, the Esquimo and the Turk, may well regret that the shortness of human life has made it impossible for him to love and study them all in their own habitats? In truth, I am unable to conceive of the varieties and species into which the human race has divided itself as other than varied flowers in the garden of the gods on earth, of which the loss of one would be heavy. In my own garden I desire to see grow all species and kinds of flowers, the rose, the rhododendron, the violet and the orchid and the cactus on the rocks. And I love the purple-eyed periwinkle as well as any plant; only if it spreads inordinately and threatens to choke all the others do I say, "It is a weed; pull it up and circumscribe it!" OLIVE SCHREINER. HANOVER, CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 1901. Thoughts on South Africa CHAPTER I SOUTH AFRICA: ITS NATURAL FEATURES, ITS DIVERSE PEOPLES, ITS POLITICAL STATUS: THE PROBLEM