a sober estimate of our national qualities and defects; it quickens a national sense of duty to our neighbour. The munificence of a far-sighted statesman has provided that selected youths, whose homes are in this land, and whose life-work may be here, shall go for a while to England, shall breathe the intellectual and social atmosphere of a great English University, and shall learn to judge for themselves of the sources from which the best English traditions have flowed. That is excellent. But it is also most desirable that those traditions should pass as living forces into the higher teaching of South Africa itself, and that their spirit should animate educational institutions whose special forms have been moulded by local requirements. That, indeed, has been, and is, the fervent wish of men whose labours for South African education have already borne abundant fruit, and are destined to bear yet larger fruit in the future. May those labours prosper, and may that wish be fulfilled! The sooner will come the day when the inhabitants of this country, this country of vast and still indefinite possibilities, will be able to feel, in a sense higher and deeper than citizens of the Roman Empire could conceive, "Cuncti gens una sumus," "We are all one people." If the work which lies before us, in this Section of the British Association, should result in contributing anything towards the promotion of those great objects, by helping to elucidate the conditions of further progress, our deliberations will not have been held in vain.
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
