Side by side with us in South Africa are other South Africans whose
position is not and cannot be exactly what ours is. Shading away from
us by imperceptible degrees, stand, on one side of us, those English
South Africans who, racially English, yet know nothing or little
personally of her; the grandparents, and not the parents of such
men, have left England; they are proud of being Englishmen, proud
of England’s great record and great names, as a man is proud of his
grandmother’s family, but they are before all things essentially South
African. They desire to see England increase and progress, and to
remain in harmony and union with her while she does not interfere with
internal affairs of South Africa, but they do not and cannot feel to
her as those of us do whose love is personal and whose intellectual
sympathies center largely in England.
Yet further from us on the same side stand our oldest white fellow
South Africans; who were, many, not of English blood originally,
though among that body of early white settlers, men who preceded us
in South Africa by three centuries, were a few with English names,
and though by intermarriage Dutch and English South Africans are
daily and hourly blending, the bulk of these folk were Dutchmen from
Holland and Friesland, with a few Swedes, Germans and Danes, and later
was intermingled with them a strong strain of Huguenot blood from
France. These men were mainly of that folk which, in the sixteenth
century, held Philip and the Spanish Empire at bay, and struck the
first death-blow into the heart of that mighty Imperial system whose
death-gasp we have witnessed to-day. A brave, free, fearless folk with
the