“NEWS FROM HOME.”
In London houses, in country cottages, in English manufacturing towns, are men and women whose life and labor, whose joy and sorrows our hearts will follow to the end, as theirs will follow ours to the end, and across the seas our hands will always be interknit with theirs. Our labor, our homes, our material interests, may all be in South Africa, but a bond of love so strong that six thousand miles of sea can only stretch it, but never sever it, binds us to the land and the friends we loved in our youth. We are South Africans, but intellectual sympathies, habits, personal emotions, have made us strike deep roots across the sea; and when the thought flashes on us, we may not walk the old streets again or press the old hands, pain rises which those only know whose hearts are divided between two lands. We are South Africans, but we are not South Africans only—we are Englishmen also:
Dear little Island,
Our heart in the sea!
If to-morrow hostile fleets encompassed England, and the tread of foreign troops was on her soil, she would not need to call to us; we would stand beside her before she had spoken. This is
OUR EXACT POSITION.
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[17] 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,[18] 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
BLOOD OF THE OLD SEA KINGS