We English are a peculiar people. More often than most other races, and in this point resembling the Jews, we tend frequently to run to extremes of contradictory vice and virtue. Exactly as the Jewish race tends to incarnate itself on the one hand in a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Spinoza, so far removed from all material and personal ambitions and desires, and on the other hand in the grasping money-lender and millionaire; as it is now manifest in a Christ and then in a Judas Iscariot, so we English appear to manifest among our folk the extremes of self-sacrificing humanity, magnanimity, and heroism, and of sordid all-grasping self-seeking. In South Africa we have had our Livingstones and our George Greys, and our Porters, men, who, across the arid wastes of political and public life, shed the perfume of large and generous individualities; men, the mere consciousness of a national relation with whom is rightly a matter of pride to an English South African's heart; while, on the other hand, our race has here manifested in certain of its representatives as much of low ambition, and merciless greed, as it has been the unfortunate province of any individuals of any race ever to exhibit. But between these extremes has lain the bulk of our ordinary officials and citizens of English descent, with the blended vices and virtues of our people; and generally possessed of the one quality which seems to be the mark of our average Englishman. With a great deal of loyalty toward our own race and a great deal of desire for freedom and independence for ourselves, and a passion for carrying out our own methods, we have also a tendency to understand very little of other races and individuals, as less important and justifiable, and far less virtuous, than our own. This is perhaps more or less characteristic of all Teutonic peoples as compared with Celtic; but it appears certainly more marked in our own English division than in any other. This disposition has its advantages. We are not easily influenced for evil or for good; if we do not learn readily, we do not soon give up that which we have learned; it yields to us a great stability; and as long as, whether as individuals or as a race, we remain on our own soil and among our own native surroundings, though it may make life a little narrow, and somewhat hard, its disadvantages are not serious or vital. But the moment we are placed in close juxtaposition with other races, or enter foreign lands, more especially as rulers or controllers, then that which was an innoxious venial defect becomes a serious, it may be even a deadly, deficiency.