Asiatic Quarterly Review (Full Title: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, and Oriental and Colonial Record): Volume XIII, No. 26 [‎485v] (95/238)

308 The Prince of Wales Professorship of History
essentially one country. In no point does this unity more
clearly manifest itself than in higher education, and in no
educational institution more clearly than in the South
African College. The University, which calls itself the
University of the Cape of Good Hope, holds its examina
tions in defiance of war and rumours of war in the Transvaal
and Orange River Colonies, as well as in the older Colonies
and Rhodesia. The Boer prisoners in South Africa and
at St. Helena have already been admitted, on their own
application, to the examinations of the University, and
those at Bermuda have just made a similar application to
the University Council. In such schools as those attached
to the South African College, and Victoria College, Stellen
bosch, St. Andrew’s College, Grahamstown, and the Diocesan
College, Rondebosch, boys from all parts of South Africa
are to be found, just as Englishmen, Welshmen, Scotchmen
and Irishmen may be found in the same remove at Eton ;
and naturally this educational federation of South Africa
shows itself even more plainly in the case of the Colleges
than in that of the Schools. It is hardly an exaggeration
to say that the university work of the whole ot South
Africa is done in or near Cape Town, and the importance
of maintaining this condition of things may perhaps be
inferred by those to whom it is not immediately patent
from the efforts which President Kruger himself made to
disturb it. Fas est et ab hoste docen.
The South African College has a remarkable position in
the history and in the present structure of South African
education. It is the oldest educational institution in the
country, having been founded in 1829; its growth has
exactly corresponded to that of the educational system as a
whole. Beginning as a school, it has developed into a
genuine university college as such an institution has been
required, and having been founded by the united efforts of
all sections of the population ten years before the existence
of any South African State except Cape Colony, it represents
by its living traditions a golden age such as the uncritical