easier than the consolidation of any separate part. It is the one form of crystallization open to us, the one shape we shall assume. South African unity is not the dream of the visionary; it is not even the forecast of genius, which makes clear and at hand that which only after ages can accomplish: it is not even like the splendid vision of that little-understood man, the first Napoleon, of a unified and consolidated Europe, which was fated to failure from the moment of its inception, because dreamed five hundred years before its time. South African unity is a condition the practical necessity for which is daily and hourly forced upon us by the common needs of life: it is the one possible condition which will enable us to solve our internal difficulties: it is the one path open to us. For this unity all great men born in South Africa during the next century will be compelled directly or indirectly to labour; it is this unity which must precede the production of anything great and beautiful by our people as a whole; neither art, nor science, nor literature, nor statecraft will flourish among us as long as we remain in our unorganized form: it is the attainment of this unity which constitutes the problem of South Africa: _How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a great, a healthy, a united, an organized nation be formed?_ If our view be right, the problem which South Africa has before it to-day is this: How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a great, healthy, united, organized nation be formed? This problem naturally divides itself into two parts. For the moment, the first is the most pressing and absorbing, that of the political union of our states; and it must precede the other. Great as are the difficulties which lie in this path at present, difficulties whose extent can only be understood by one who has deeply studied our internal condition, yet so urgent is the practical need for it, so ripe the time, that there are probably men now living who may see it accomplished. It is impossible to study the South Africa of to-day and doubt that within sixty years there will exist here a great centralized and independent form of government embodying the united political will of the people; that with regard to external defence and the most vital internal problems, South Africa will be politically one; _its state divisions, while developed and intensified in certain directions_, will be relegated to the performance of those invaluable functions of self-government for which they are so admirably fitted. Circumstances and individuals favouring, we may see this accomplished before the next decade is out; it must come at last.