The fact that this survival, and his opposition to the modern spirit, is not merely the result of the Boer's geographical severance from Europe, and that it has largely depended on his little language, is made clearer when we glance at other emigrant European peoples. However far distant from Europe, in North America, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, wherever a European race has settled, if it has not (as in the case of the Spanish and the Portuguese in their South African and South American colonies) mingled its blood largely with that of the aborigines, then that translated branch is found, not only to retain its connection with European life and growth, but in many cases to lead in that growth. It is often remarked on as matter for wonder in these colonies how large is the percentage of individuals taking the lead in the social, material and intellectual life, who were reared among circumstances which most widely severed them from the external and material conditions of modern civilization. But there is no cause for this wonder. The European emigrant who settles in the backwoods of a new country, may rear his family in primeval solitude, they may grow up on the roughest fare and the closest contact with untamed nature; the man may have no education and little time or aptitude for imparting to his son culture or learning, but his speech is one of the earth's great tongues, spoken by one in fifteen or one in twenty of the inhabitants of the globe, and his son inherits it. The mother or grandmother may teach the child his letters from an old primer, and, for the rest, his education may be only that which nature gives to the wildest of her children. He may grow up without the sight of a city, and beyond the reach of the touch of luxury; but he has in his hand the key to all nineteenth-century civilization. Should a chance traveller pass at intervals of months or years, the boy may listen eagerly to his conversation; and if he leaves behind him a tattered book or the torn page of a six months' old newspaper, or if the lad's mother unearth from the bottom of an old trunk a couple of brown volumes brought by her mother or grandmother from Europe, the boy can spell them out and pore over them, and gain a glimpse into the world beyond. If, at seventeen or eighteen, he tires of the life of the backwood and desires to see the life beyond, he has only to shoulder his bundle, and at the end of a hundred or thousand miles he finds himself in a city. All about him may be strange at first; he is awkward in act, slow in speech, but there is not a word or a sound in the world about him that is not modifying him; the talk of the men in the lodging-house, the arguments of the men in the public-bar, the chatter at the street corners, the newspapers he takes up, the cheap books he buys for a few pence, open the modern world to him. In six months' time he may only be distinguishable from the men about him by his greater vigour or the