You say that he still wears the little short jacket of his great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather? Yes, and had he given that up, it would have been to wear none at all! So, line by line, his wife made it, carefully as his father's forefather's had been. You say he stuck generation after generation to the straight-backed elbow chair and the hard-backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes--and had he given them up, it could have been to adopt nothing more æsthetic; it would have been to sit on the floor; so he held solemnly to the old elbow-chair and the straight-backed sofa, almost as a matter of faith. You say that he had only one book, and clung to that with a passion that was almost idolatry? Yes--but had he given up that one book, it could not have been to fill a library with the world's literature; it would have been to have no literature at all! That one book, which he painfully spelled through and so mightily treasured, was his only link with the world's great stream of thought, morals, and knowledge. That compilation of the history, poetry, and philosophy of the great Semitic people was his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual and intellectual life of the human race. In that he clung to it so passionately, worshipped it so determinedly, he showed his intense hankering after something other than the mere material aspects of life. He was not a man with a thousand avenues open before him toward thought and spiritual and intellectual knowledge, who wilfully shut his eyes to them, saying, "I will see none but this one": he had no other to see. If the Boer had forsaken his Bible we should have found him to-day a savage, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it. To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence of his to the past. That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer woman's elbow-chair, "My children, never forget you are white men! Do always as you have seen your father and mother do!" was no cry of a weak conservatism, fearful of change; it was the embodiment of the passionate determination of a powerful little people, not to lose itself in the barbarism about it, and so sink in the scale of being. To laugh at the conservatism of the Boer is to laugh at a man who, floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercely with one hand to the only outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it by so much as one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp. That the conservatism of the Boer has in it nothing of the nature of mental ossification, and that he has preserved his pliability intact, is shown by the peculiar facility with which, when the time comes, the Boer leaps in one generation from the rear of the seventeenth-century thought and action to the forefront of the nineteenth.