It is somewhat curious to reflect on all that he has missed. The Europe he left was a Europe still reddened by the fires that burned witches and heretics; Newton was a little child playing in Lincolnshire fields; Descartes had been in his grave two years; it was not twenty since Galileo had been obliged, before a Christian tribunal, to disclaim the heresy of the earth's movement; it was not fifty years since Bruno was burnt for asserting the unity of God and Nature, and Vanini at Toulouse for empiricism; and Calvin's murder of Servetus still tainted the spiritual air. For the Boer, the awakening of human reason in the eighteenth century, with its stern demand for intellectual tolerance, and its enunciation of universal brotherhood, never existed. The cry for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, with which later on the heart of Europe leaped forth to grasp an ideal for which men's hands were not yet quite pure enough, but which rent the thunder-cloud of despotism brooding over Europe; the Napoleonic wars and the crash of thrones; the growth of physical science, re-shaping not only man's physical existence but yet more his social and ethical life, of these things the Boer behind his little Taal wall heard and felt nothing. Even the rise of the commercial system during the last century, which has spread out its claw till it covers not only Europe, but is digging its nails into the muscular fibre of all the world, and which has enthroned in place of all the old ideals, national, religious and personal, simply one--wealth; and which seems to sit to-day, crowned over human life as no tyranny has ever done before--of this phase of modern life the Boer also knows nothing. He still believes there are things money cannot buy; that a man may have three millions of money in syndicate shares, and hold command over the labour of ten thousand workers, and yet be no better than he who goes out every morning in his leather trousers to tend his own sheep. Still less has the Boer caught the faintest sound of that deep whisper, which to-day is passing from end to end of the civilized world, questioning whether this commercial god be indeed the final god of the race; whether his throne might not yet fall as others have fallen before: a whisper which may at any moment break out into the wildest cry that has yet rung round earth--and humanity, breaking down the idol, may start on its march in search of a new shrine. Of these two mighty movements, the one apparent and dominant everywhere, and the other silently riddling the ground beneath it into holes, till it sounds hollow beneath the foot--of these matters also the Boer knows nothing. As he is ignorant of the gracious and generous developments of the modern world, so he recks nothing of the diseases which have fastened on to it, or the reactions against them.