That this is so can be proved by the eloquence of facts rather than by words.  It is sufficient to look upon what South Africa was twenty-five years ago, and upon what it has become since under the protection of British rule, to be convinced of the truth of my assertion.  From a land of perennial unrest and perpetual strife it has been transformed into a prosperous and quiet colony, absorbed only in the thought of its economic and commercial progress.  Its population, which twenty years ago was wasting its time and energy in useless wrangles, stands to-day united to the Mother Country and absorbed by the sole thought of how best to prove its devotion.

The Boer War has still some curious issues of which no notice has been taken by the public at large.  One of the principal, perhaps indeed the most important of these, is that, though brought about by material ambitions of certain people, it ended by being fought against these very same people, and that its conclusion eliminated them from public life instead of adding to their influence and their power.  The result is certainly a strange and an interesting one, but it is easily explained if one takes into account the fact that once England as a nation—­and not as the nation to which belonged the handful of adventurers through whose intrigues the war was brought about—­entered into the possession of the Transvaal and organised the long-talked-of Union of South Africa, the country started a normal existence free from the unhealthy symptoms which had hindered its progress.  It became a useful member of the vast British Empire, as well as a prosperous country enjoying a good government, and launched itself upon a career it could never have entered upon but for the war.  Destructive as it was, the Boer campaign was not a war of annihilation.  On the contrary, without it it would have been impossible for the vast South African territories to become federated into a Union of its own and at the same time to take her place as a member of another Empire from which it derived its prosperity and its welfare.  The grandeur of England and the soundness of its leaders has never come out in a more striking manner than in this conquest of South Africa—­a blood-stained conquest which has become a love match.

During the concluding years of last century the possibility of union was seldom taken into consideration; few, indeed, were clever enough and wise enough to find out that it was bound to take place as a natural consequence of the South African War.  The war cleared the air all over South Africa.  It crushed and destroyed all the suspicious, unhealthy elements that had gathered around the gold mines of the Transvaal and the diamond fields of Cape Colony.  It dispersed the coterie of adventurers who had hastened there with the intention of becoming rapidly rich at the expense of the inhabitants of the country.  A few men had succeeded in building for themselves fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice, whilst the majority contrived to live more or less well at the expense of those naive enough to trust to them in financial matters until the day when the war arrived to put an end to their plunderings.