was given everywhere to that broad distinction made by the Boer mind between white and black, to the latter of whom, in all shades, neither civil nor religious rights of any sort were allowed, more than to the four-legged cattle who joined with them to make up the live-stock of the Colony. For a century and a half this view had been gaining strength, and it blazed out brightly in the first years of the English rule; but its extinction was near.

The missionaries deserve the chief honour of bringing about the change. To the consciousness of this is due the antipathy with which they were regarded by almost all the whites of the Cape two generations ago, and which still survives amongst the less enlightened Boers of the inland districts. Some of the obloquy thrown on the early missionaries, whose converts were accused of making fine words an excuse for laziness and vice, was probably deserved: what the Chinese call “rice Christians" must always occur in the early history of a mission. But the head and front of the missionaries' offending appears very differently to our modern eyes: they raised the price of labour by increasing the value which the natives set upon themselves and their ideas of the necessaries of

life. At the mission stations the Hottentot learnt for the first time that he was a man, and that he ought to "be'ayve as sich." "This was a lesson he could never forget, so that by those who were accustomed to the instant obedience and abject submission of slaves, the mission Hottentots soon came to be regarded as violent and rebellious." Consequently, every possible obstacle was put in the way of mission work by the farmers and the smaller officials at the Cape.

But there now lay an appeal to the public opinion of a great nation instead of the selfish oligarchy of the Dutch East India Company. The Rev. Dr. Philip took advantage of it by publishing a book which exposed the wrongs of the Hottentots, regarded as human beings. Fowell Buxton, Brougham, Mackintosh took up the question, and proposed to raise it in the House of Commons. The government at home and at the Cape determined to be beforehand with the Whigs, and the result was the passage, on July 17, 1828, of the Fiftieth Ordinance, which once and for all gave the Hottentots every civil right to which the European colonists laid claim. It long had to encounter violent opposition among the Boers; but no one

who is acquainted with its results and who holds modern ideas on these subjects will venture to disapprove of its aims or deny its efficiency.

The next great step taken for the amelioration of the condition of the natives was the emancipation of the slaves, which was ordained, throughout British dominions, by the passage of Mr. Fowell Buxton's Bill in August, 1833. This, together with certain attendant circumstances that will be mentioned in a later chapter, raised the indignation of many of the Boers to boiling-point. Then commenced the Great Trek which resulted in the foundation of the two Boer Republics of to-day. Whatever trouble we have had and may still meet in these States, Englishmen have the satisfaction of feeling that it is part of the price they have had to pay for their sincere and philanthropic attempt to make life easier and better for their native subjects in South Africa.

CHAPTER II

THE BOERS AND THEIR ANCESTORS

THE racial history of that part of the population of the Cape Colony which, in familiar parlance, we call the Boers deserves to be investigated, before one begins to tell the story of their separate existence in the Transvaal. It has already been stated that the name of Boer is simply a Dutch word akin to the German bauer, peasant. Our word boor has the same origin, but it has grown to denote certain qualities, found in many peasants, which do not necessarily exist in the Cape Boer, who is simply a peasant proprietor, farmer, or squatter.

The first notion of the essential Boer in the popular mind is, probably, that he is of pure Dutch descent, a belief which his language, a bastard and jejune Dutch patois known as "the Taal," helps to confirm. But this is by no means the whole truth. { A Boer of the Transvaal, picked out at random,

may indeed, like Pretorius, trace his descent direct from the Netherlanders who fought at Haarlem and withstood the wrath of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. Or he may pride himself upon the fact that in his veins runs the blood of the French Protestants who fought at Moncontour, and followed the white plume of the most romantic of kings at Ivry. It is also quite possible, though he will not boast of the fact, that he has something more than a tinge of native blood. But it is mainly from Dutch and French elements that the Transvaal Boer derives his being.

The earliest European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, as we have already seen, were servants of the Dutch East India Company. Van Riebeek's original followers consisted chiefly of soldiers and sailors, with a few artisans and gardeners. Two galleots which speedily followed him brought out fifty workmen and a clergyman, whose courageous wife, a month after landing, bore him the first European child that saw light in South Africa. At first, of course, the Dutch at the Cape were not settlers, but men holding a military post in the midst of unknown dangers, for whom there could be no question of marrying and giving in marriage.