For it may be more than questioned whether even brother Jonathan, in spite of the back score against her and the large admixture of foreign blood in his veins, would sit still to see the foreigner crush the nesting-place of his people; to see the cradle of his tongue, the land of Chaucer and Shakespeare trampled down by men who know not their speech. And the Irish-Englishman all the world over, forgetting six centuries of contumely would, with the magnanimity of his generous race, stand shoulder to shoulder with his English brother, as he stood and died beside him in every country under the sun. Blood is thicker than water--and language binds closer than blood. The England of to-day may disregard this emotional attitude towards herself and her colonists, and by persistent indifference and coldness may kill it, as a father by neglect may alienate the heart of his son, and turn to stone what was once throbbing flesh. And it is fully possible that as England of the past, when her government was conducted by an ignorant, monarchical aristocracy, despised her colonies because they were small democracies, and alienated them by ruthlessly using them for her own purposes; so the England of to-day, becoming rapidly a democracy may, through the supine indifference and self-centred narrowness inherent in the nature of over-worked uncultivated masses, kill out for ever the possibilities which might arise from the full recognition and cultivation of this emotion. But the fact remains that to-day this bond exists; the English-speaking colonist is bound to the birthplace of his speech; and little obtrusive as this passion may be, it is yet one of the most pregnant social phenomena of the modern world, one capable of modifying the future, not only of Anglo-Saxon peoples, but of the human race.[15] [15] (Footnote added in 1900.) Yet England killed it in America a century ago, and she is killing it in South Africa to-day. We ask no forgiveness for thus digressing, for until the attitude of other European colonists towards their home lands has been fully grasped, the very exceptional position of the Boer, and the effect of his attitude on himself and South Africa, and the importance of the Huguenot influence in producing this attitude, cannot be understood. So complete has been the Boer's severance from his fatherlands in Europe, both France and Holland, that for him they practically do not exist. For two hundred years their social and political life has rolled on unrecked of by him; Paris and The Hague are no nearer to his heart than Madrid or Vienna. He will swear more lustily at you if you call him a Frenchman or a Hollander than should you call him an Englishman or a German; and we have known primitive Boers who have vigorously denied that they had even originally descended from either Hollanders or Frenchmen. The Huguenot has caused this severance in two ways.