In early childhood we remember to have heard a sapient old lady remark that she had always noticed that orphan and adopted children, as born, were differently constituted from all others; you might take them from their birth and bring them up with your own: they never turn out the same! It has since often occurred to us that the fallacy underlying that old lady's induction, and patent even to a childish intelligence, might, in a more complex form, underlie the dictum with regard to the Half-caste. As the old lady overlooked the fact that, while _materially_ the position of the adopted child might resemble that of her own, _emotionally_, and therefore eventually _morally_, its training was wholly unlike. That a child brought up in a home which it feels its own by right, and surrounded from infancy by the yearning affection born of parental instinct, has a moral training differing by at least three-fourths from that of a child who grows up always doubtful of its own standing, and looking out with fierce and bitter eyes into a world which has no welcome for it: so it has always appeared to us that a Half-caste, even in a state in which he is politically on the same footing as his fellow-citizens, must find a something in his emotional relations with the world about him which would account for his assuming a lower social attitude, without any necessity of appealing to a theory of inborn depravity. The social position of the South African Half-caste has been peculiar. He has originated in almost all cases, not from the union of average individuals of the two races uniting under average conditions, but as the result of a sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. He has risen from a union not only devoid of the intellectual sympathy and kinship between man and woman which translates the relation of sex from the sphere of the crudely physical to that of the æsthetic and intellectual; but even that lower utilitarian element was wanting to this union which exists wherever men and women of the same race, and moderately respecting each other, unite permanently for the purpose of producing offspring and sharing the material burdens of life. The Half-caste came into the world as the result of the most undifferentiated sex instinct. He saw the first light usually in the back room of the slaves' compound, or in the hut across the yard, and entered a world in which there was no place prepared for him. To his father he was the broken wineglass left from last night's feast or as the remembrance of last year's sin--a thing one would rather forget--or, at best, he was a useful tool. To his master's wife, if there were one, he was an object of loathing (of that curious loathing, known perhaps only to the Aryan woman, who sees the blood that flows in her children's veins, flow also beneath the dark skin of an alien