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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 more quiet strength which a contact with inanimate nature has left him. In five years' time, if he have inherited will and intelligence, you may find him the rising man of business or the self-taught but cultured student; in ten or fifteen more he may be the learned professor, the railway king, the foreign ambassador, the president of a state, or the writer with a world-wide reputation. Given that a man inherits as his birthright some literary European speech and attains some elementary knowledge of its letters, and the civilized world is his oyster, the knife to open which he holds in his hand, if he have the strength to use it. No isolation among barbarous surroundings can sever a man from the life of Europe who keeps his hold on the language and literature. In the heart of Kaffirland to-day you may come across a solitary German trader's hut; the man who inhabits it has been twenty-five years severed from Europe; his material surroundings are little better than those of the barbarians around him; but on the shelf in the corner are a dozen old books, and in the drawer of the table he has a score of last year's reviews and papers. You are astonished by the passionate eagerness with which, as soon as he has lost his shyness, he proceeds to discuss, or rather to pour out his views on the world's greatest problems to you; and when he finds you have just returned from Europe, there is something pathetic in the range and child-like eagerness of his questions:—"What do they think in Europe, of the possibility of war between Russia and England?" "Did you see the new French actor who came out last year?"—whose name you, fresh from Europe have perhaps not even heard. "Is the Queen looking aged?"—and he draws out a little shilling guide to the year before last's picture gallery, and gives you his opinion of the little prints. While you are having your dinner of Kaffir corn or mealies and mutton he discusses the existing relation between France and Germany; and he asks your opinion on some detail connected with the last revolution in South America, of which you are perhaps obliged to confess you know nothing. He has read of it in all his papers. Twenty-five years of separation have not tended necessarily to sever the man from the life of Europe, but have rather sharpened his interest; and it would sometimes seem as though the denizen of some solitary outpost of civilization is apt to take a broader and more impartial view of civilization, as a whole, than he who in some world-centre of civilization, such as London or Paris, is apt to get too much dust in his eyes from the life immediately about him to be able to see far. The solitary white child, who grows up in the mission house on the banks of the Ganges, or the planter's home in the far Indies, may discover with astonishment when at last it finds itself in the heart of that civilization of which it has dreamed and for which it has panted, that from the old book-shelf with its score of volumes read and re-read and long pored over, and from the mail-bag arriving once a month, every scrap of whose news from the great outer world was carefully stored in childish memory and long dwelt on, it had learnt most of what London and Paris had to teach it; that what it had sucked out in its solitude was the true core of civilization; that what was left for it to consume further was principally the shell; for it would not be difficult to mention half-a-dozen books in any literary European language which, read a dozen times and pondered over, would make a man a true denizen of the nineteenth century in all that it holds of value, and enable him to reach the forefront of European life. A bee will make as sweet and as rich honey from one bunch of flowers as though you should give him a whole garden to choose from; its quality and sweetness will depend upon the nature of his own little tube—but you must give him that one bunch.