"_Remember the Jew smous's clock!_ There be many Jew smouses going up and down in this civilization of ours; and they deal in other things besides clocks. They will traffic with you for your land, your freedom, your independence, your very souls--for they hold that '_every man has his price!_'--and they will give you in exchange that which will not wear--a gilt-lined robe, which, soon as you wear it, will eat the flesh of freedom from off your bones and lick up the blood of liberty within your veins. Therefore, beware how you deal with them! That little which you have, hold fast till you see what shall come to pass. "The last Belshazzar's feast has not been held! Be careful that, when the finger appears writing on the wall, you be not found also sitting at that table. "Hold fast a little while longer, we pray of you, by your old ideals, your old manners, your simple old-world life. We--South Africa--the world, have need of you!" So, were it possible that our words should reach him, we would fain apostrophize our old-world Boer and his wife. For our fear indeed is, not that he will exhibit any incapacity for accepting nineteenth-century ideals, but that he may swallow them too readily; and that South Africa, whose backbone he forms, may also suffer from that curvature of the spine, brought on by an excessive addiction to luxury and an ill-distribution of wealth, from which certain other peoples are dying. * * * * * To the other indictments which have been made, by those who have not understood him, against the Boer, it would seem hardly worth now referring, yet before we finally turn from him we may glance at them. * * * * * It has been said that he is priest-ridden. It is undoubtedly true that the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church held in the past, and still to a limited extent hold to-day, a unique position among their people as compared with the mass of modern clergy. We in the heart of the nineteenth-century civilization regard, and most rightly, with an almost unqualified scorn the modern man or woman who submits to priestly dictation. Where the priest has no means of gaining information, experience of life, or abstruse knowledge not shared by other members of his society, submission to his dicta or dependence on his advice can spring only from two causes--an intellectual feebleness, which prevents the use of the man's reason, or a moral cowardice, which causes him to shrink facing the responsibility of dealing with the moral and spiritual problems of life, and renders him desirous of having them dealt with vicariously.