Great men, great actions, great arts, great developments, are impossible without those closely united, interacting organic combinations of men which we call nations, using that word in its largest sense, and to include all organized, centralized, interacting masses of humans and to exclude such as are inorganic and only united in name or by force. The organically united nation is the only known matrix in which the human being can attain to full development. A Plato, an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, implying as much the existence of a Greece, an England, or an Italy, are as impossible without them as an eye or brain imply and would be impossible without a whole human organism. They are the efflorescence of the nations. Without the closely united, interacting, organically bound body of humans, no great men, no highly developed masses. Therefore, in all ages, and rightly, men have set the highest value on the maintenance of their social organization, and have regarded as a greater evil than any which could afflict them personally the destruction of their organism as a whole. The individual particles may be left untouched (as in the case of Poland), but they suffer more deeply from the loss of interaction and organized union than had they separately been individually destroyed. Nor is it only the particles composing a national organism that gain by its maintenance in health and unity. From a wider standpoint it is of importance to humanity as a whole. The virile organized individuality of Greece, of Rome, of England (while it remained an organized unity and had not begun to dissolve itself into an inchoate trading firm, seeking to dominate by force peoples and lands in all parts of the world for trade purposes), and of France has bequeathed almost as much to humanity at large as to its own members; and an old, diseased or disorganized nationality, or a young, shapeless, unorganized mass of humans, however healthy the individual units composing it may be, is a mass without the capability of full development or of adding to the common fund of humanity. The first need of an unorganized mass of humans is to attain to some form of vital organization. This must precede the fullest development of the individual units, and must adjust itself before any complex internal growth can begin. Painfully trite as these observations are, it is necessary to keep them in mind when dealing with the South African question.