Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

109 страница из 115

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.

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.