“This was the last kindly action and friendly advice of a distinguished, noble-minded, and self-forgetful Christian man, who had befriended me as an obscure person,—­our meeting-ground and common object being the future welfare of all races in South Africa.  I went forth to complete my life work:  he remained to die.”

It was a costly sacrifice made on the Altar of Party.

My friends have sometimes asked me, what then is the ground of my hope for the future of our country and all over whom our Queen reigns?  I reply,—­my hope lies in the fact that above all party differences, above all private and political theories, above all the mere outward forms of Government and the titles given to these, there stand, eternally firm and unchangeable, the great principles of our Constitution which are the basis of our Jurisprudence, and of every Law which is inherently just.  I use these words deliberately—­“eternally firm and unchangeable.”  A long and deep study of these principles, and some experience of the grief and disaster caused by any grave departure from them, have convinced me that these principles are founded on the highest ethics,—­the ethics of Christ.

The great Charter of our Liberties was born, as all the most precious things are, through “great tribulation,” at a time when our whole nation was groaning under injustice and oppression, and when sorrow had purified the eyes of the noble “Seers” of the time, and their appeal was to the God of Justice Himself, and to no lower tribunal.  These Seers were then endowed with the power to bend the will of a stubborn and selfish monarch, and to put on record the stern principles of our “Immortal Charter.”

I have often longed that every school-boy and girl should be taught and well-grounded in these great principles.  It would not be a difficult nor a dry study, for like all great things, these principles are simple, straight, and clear as the day.  It is when, we come to intricacies and technicalities of laws, even though based on these great fundamental lines, that the study becomes dry, useful to the professional lawyer, but not to the pupil in school or the public generally.

The principles of our Constitution have been many times in the course of our national history disregarded, and sometimes openly violated.  But such disregard and such violation have happily not been allowed to be of long duration.  Sometimes the respect of these principles has been restored by the efforts of a group of enlightened Statesmen, but more frequently by the awakened “Common Sense"[29] of the people, who have become aware that they, or even some very humble section of them, have been made to suffer by such violation.  Again and again the gallant “Ship of our Constitution,” carrying the precious cargo of our inalienable rights and liberties, has righted herself in the midst of storms and heavy seas of trouble.  Having been called for thirty years of my life to