Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/665

Rh molded, from generation to generation, by the aim of ensuring a supply of men qualified to bear a worthy part, either in the government of the nation, or in professional activities which are indispensable to the national welfare. In our own time, and more especially within the last thirty years, one particular aspect of that idea is illustrated by the closer connections which have been formed between the universities and the higher branches of the civil service. The conception of work for the commonweal is in its turn inseparable from loyalty to those ideals of character and conduct by which English life and public policy have been built up. It is by the long and gradual training which such ideals have given that our race has been fitted to grapple with responsibilities which have inevitably grown, both in extent and in complexity, far beyond anything of which our forefathers could have dreamed. That training tends also to national self-knowledge; it makes for a sober estimate of our national qualities and defects; it quickens a national sense of duty to our neighbor. The munificence of a farsighted 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 molded by local requirements. That, indeed, has been, and is, the fervent wish of men whose labors for South African education have already borne abundant fruit, and are destined to bear yet larger fruit in the future. May those labors 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.