harmony between the two races in South Africa.  In one shape or other union has always been the goal of South-African aspiration.  It was “Union” which the “prancing proconsuls” of an earlier time—­the Freres, the Shepstones, and the Lanyons—­tried to force upon the Dutch.  A united Africa was at once the dream of a Rhodes and (perhaps) the ambition of a Kruger.  It is necessary to appreciate the strength of this desire for union on the part of both races and the intense South-African patriotism in which it rests in order to understand how the different sections and races of a country so recently locked in the death-struggle of a three years’ war could be brought so rapidly into harmonious concert.

The point is well illustrated by looking at the composition of the convention, which, in its sessions at Durban, Cape Town, and Bloemfontein, put together the present constitution.  South Africa, from its troubled history, has proved itself a land of strong men.  But it was reserved for the recent convention to bring together within the compass of a single council-room the surviving leaders of the period of conflict to work together for the making of a united state.  In looking over the list of them and reflecting on the part that they played toward one another in the past, one realizes that we have here a grim irony of history.  Among them is General Louis Botha, Prime Minister at the moment of the Transvaal, and now the first prime minister of South Africa.  Botha, in the days of Generals Buller and the Dugela, was the hardest fighter of the Boer Republic.  Beside him in the convention was Dr. Jameson, whom Botha wanted to hang after the raid in 1896.  Another member is Sir George Farrar, who was sentenced to death for complicity in the raid, and still another, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, once the secretary of the Reform League at Johannesburg and well known as the author of the “Transvaal from Within.”  One may mention in contrast General Jan Smuts, an ex-leader of the Boer forces, and since the war the organizing brain of the Het Volk party.  There is also Mr. Merriman, a leader of the British party of opposition to the war in 1899 and since then a bitter enemy of Lord Milner and the new regime.

Yet strangely enough after some four months of session the convention accomplished the impossible by framing a constitution that met the approval of the united delegates.  Of its proceedings no official journal was kept.  The convention met first at Durban, October 12, 1908, where it remained throughout that month; after a fortnight’s interval it met again at Capetown, and with a three weeks’ interruption at Christmas continued and completed its work at the end of the first week of February.  The constitution was then laid before the different colonial parliaments.  In the Transvaal its acceptance was a matter of course, as the delegates of both parties had reached an agreement on its terms.  The Cape Parliament passed amendments which involved giving up the scheme of proportional