TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 605 
South Africa will command keen attention, and will be followed by earnest good 
wishes, not only in England but throughout the British dominions. One of the 
ideas which are bound up with the history and the traditions of our English 
public schools and Universities is the idea of efficient work for the State. Those 
institutions have been largely moulded, from generation to generation, by the aim 
of ensuring a supply of men qualified to bear a worthy part either in the govern- 
ment 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 neigh- 
bour. 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 educa- 
tional 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 ful- 
filled! 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, Cuneti 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, 
The following Paper was read :— 
Cape Education: us Difficulties and Development. 
By Rev. W. E. C. Crarxes, W.A. 
A comprehensive survey of the whole subject would be impossible in the 
limited time available, and the utmost that can be attempted is to follow with 
brief criticism the development of the various stages in the light of the peculiar 
difficulties of the country. It is hoped that a full appreciation of these last will 
serve to clear the view, and perhaps to soften the judgment of those visiting these 
southern shores for the first time, who might be disposed to estimate our progress 
by a standard borrowed from more favoured lands, 
The historic development must first be noticed. In 1652, under the leadership 
of Van Riebeek, a permanent settlement was made at the Cape of a number of the 
servants of the Dutch East India Company, most of them soldiers and sailors, and 
many not of Dutch origin. Severe restrictions, impozed in the interests of the 
company, hampered the energy of these first settlers, even sea-fishing being 
restrained, and the Colonists bemg compelled to follow a pastoral and agricultural 
life. The Huguenot exiles in 1688, few in numbers, but numerous in proportion 
to the whole poration, by intermarriage with the original settlers, affected 
strongly the subsequent character of the race, and the forcible suppression of their 
