Even of those large external events which have marked the march of the civilized world during the last forty years few reports have reached him; or but a faint adumbration. The American Civil War of thirty-five years ago, when the foremost branch of the Anglo-Saxon peoples decided, amid a torrent of its own blood, what was to be the permanent attitude of advancing humanity on the greatest question of interhuman relations--of this he knows nothing. John Brown and Harper's Ferry are names as unfamiliar to him as Marathon and Thermopylæ; Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, Darwin, Whitman, Mill, Emerson, and Marx are as absolutely mere names to him as Jan Dikpens or Jan Bovenlander. Few of the stars shining over our heads now were in his firmament when he left Europe, nor was the dark shadow there which broods over us. When one considers these things, then we understand our African Boer. There is then nothing puzzling in the fact that he, a pure-blooded European, descended from some of the most advanced and virile nations of Europe, and being no poor peasant crushed beneath the heel of others, but in many cases a wealthy landowner with flocks, herds, and crowds of dependents beneath him, and in his collective capacity governing States as large as European countries, should yet, in this latter half of the nineteenth century, possess on many matters a faith which has been outgrown by a London or Paris gamin; that he should hold fanatically that the sun does not move and repeat the story of Gideon to support his view; and that he often regards scab, itch, and various skin diseases affecting his stock as pre-ordained of an almighty intelligence which should not be interfered with by mere human remedies; that he looks often upon the insurance of public buildings as a direct insult to Jehovah, who, if he sends a fire to punish a people, should not be defeated by an insurance of the building;[21] that his faith in ghosts and witches is unshaken;--all this becomes comprehensible when we remember that his faiths, social customs and personal habits, so astonishing in the eyes of the modern nineteenth-century European, are nothing more than the survivals of the faiths and customs universal among our forefathers two hundred years ago; that they in no way originated with, or are peculiar to, the South African Boer.[22] [21] This view was propounded and backed by the votes of a majority in the Transvaal Parliament recently. [22] It may be truly remarked that among the uncultured in Europe the same faith in ghosts and witches and even more appalling superstitions are rife; and this is certainly the case. But what is peculiar is that this unscientific attitude is formed in men often of unusual ability and high practical gifts.