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Commercial interests we have, and they are strong; but they are not conterminous with our state boundaries, and do not strengthen them.

Viewed thus, we see that the States of South Africa are not, taken isolatedly, national; their boundaries are of the nature of electoral, cantonal, fiscal, political divisions; of immense importance, and by all means to be preserved, as such divisions are, but not to be mistaken for those deeper, subtler and organic divisions from which the life of great nations takes its rise. There is far more resemblance between the population of the Transvaal and that of the Colony, Free State, or Natal, than between the populations of Yorkshire and Surrey; there is far more subtle, deep-lying, organic difference between Normandy and Bordeaux than between Natal and the Cape Colony. In looking at the political divisions of South Africa, one is irresistibly reminded of a well-known English village, in which the boys on the one side of the street threw stones at the boys on the other, because the parish boundary ran down the centre. Great nations are not founded on such differences as these.