The war dragged its weary course, and the Boers fought with such heroism, and often with such chivalry, as to win the cordial respect and admiration of their enemies.  It is always a pity when men fight; but sometimes a fight lets bad blood escape, and makes friendship easier between foes who have learnt mutual respect.  Four years after the peace which added the Transvaal and the Orange Free State as conquered dominions to the British Empire, the British government established in both of these provinces the full institutions of responsible self-government.  As in Canada sixty years earlier, the two races were bidden to work together and make the best of one another; because now their destinies were freely under their own control.  Yet this was even a bolder experiment than that of Canada, and showed a more venturesome confidence in the healing power of self-government.  How has it turned out?  Within five years more, the four divided provinces which had presented such vexed problems in 1878, were combined in the federal Union of South Africa, governed by institutions which reproduced those of Britain and her colonies.

In handing over to the now united states of South Africa the unqualified control of their own affairs, Britain necessarily left to them the vexed problem of devising a just relation between the ruling races and their subjects of backward or alien stocks; the problem which had been the source of most of the difficulties of South Africa for a century past, and which had long delayed the concession of full self-government.  Nowhere in the world does this problem assume a more acute form than in South Africa, where there is not only a majority of negroes, mostly of the vigorous Bantu stock, but also a large number of immigrants mainly from India, who as subjects of the British crown naturally claim special rights.  South Africa has to find her own solution for this complex problem; and she has not yet fully found it.  But in two ways her association with the British Empire has helped, and will help, her to find her way towards it.  If the earlier policy of the British government, guided by the missionaries, laid too exclusive an emphasis upon native rights, and in various ways hampered the development of the colony by the way in which it interpreted these rights, at least it had established a tradition hostile to that policy of mere ruthless exploitation of which such an ugly illustration was being given in German South-West Africa.  An absolute parity of treatment between white and black must be not only impracticable, but harmful to both sides.  But between the two extremes of a visionary equality and a white ascendancy ruthlessly employed for exploitation, a third term is possible—­the just tutelage of the white man over the black, with a reasonable freedom for native custom.  ’A practice has grown up in South Africa,’ says the greatest of South African statesmen, [Footnote:  General Smuts, May 22, 1917.] ’of creating parallel institutions,