One may live beside him for years, and watch his social life, without the thought ever occurring, "Ah! were but the sexual condition of these folk altered, were their traditions and modes of action with regard to sex but more in harmony with the need and thoughts of at least the best part of the community, how healthful would be their condition!" That unlovely confusion which prevails in our civilized life, where sham institutions, too high for one-half of our folk, overlay institutions too savage to see daylight, and the sex relations, which should be the joy of a people, form often the diseased and painful side of the national life--and the perception of which haunts one hourly, as one walks the streets of our great cities, or watches the life of our drawing-rooms or alleys--does not exist in the simple uniform condition of the South African Boer. In our hurly-burly societies, in which the brothel with its female outcasts and the male prostitutes whose gold supports it are found side by side with men and women to whom sex relationships are already sacramental; in which a large mass of the community are still in that stage in which marriage itself is contracted mainly as the result of an arithmetical calculation, while, to another large and always growing section, it is a union based upon, and mainly consisting of, a psychic union, whose spontaneity constitutes its strength:--we in such societies are compelled hourly to discuss, if not audibly at least in our own minds, the right and wrong, the usefulness and non-usefulness of the sexual laws and customs of our societies; and we seek in vain to reduce them to a uniformity suitable to the wants of all. To us, as individuals and as societies, life presents itself as a series of problems, which have to be worked out and solved, if solved at all, by the individual for himself during the course of his life, and by our societies as wholes in the course of generations; and this is above all true with regard to matters of sex. For the Boer, on the other hand, in his quiescent and unchanging social condition, there is no such difficulty. With him, where generation has succeeded generation without being exposed to the action of any new forces, and where almost identical mental and material conditions have been brought to bear on every member of the society, there is of necessity almost absolute social homogeneity--and with homogeneity an absence of all those varied conditions which perplex us.