With the rexpects of CAUSES OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA BY JAMES GREEN A MEMBER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAR. SECOND EDITION. WORCESTER, MASS., U. S. A., JUNE, 1900. CAUSES OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA. It was in 1652, more than a century and a half after the Portuguese discoverers had doubled the Cape of Good Hope, when the Dutch East India Company founded a station near the present Cape Town as a point where their ships on the way to India could call and get fresh meat and vegetables and put their sick into hospital; for the long voyage of those days brought sickness or death to many an adventurer. Six years later, West African slaves were brought into the colony, and soon afterwards Malay convicts from the East Indies. In 1689, 300 French Huguenots came from Holland to the Cape. Here were the elements of the population. The French became lost in the Dutch surroundings. Their language, customs, education, disappeared after a few generations, and little that was distinctively French remained except some family names. The Malays fused with the blacks. The result was white masters and black slaves. If there were some blacks who were not quite slaves, they were all a servile caste, easily distinguished by color from the masters. The colony was ruled by the Dutch East India Company, with a view to the company's interests and not for the colonists. The settlers, growing restless, wandered off from the settlement far into the interior, tending their herds and living a wandering life remote from government, law and taxes. They were too poor ever to get back to Holland and keep in touch with its education and refinement. A hundred and fifty years of this remote and solitary life to the close of the eighteenth century found them still wandering on the high tablelands of the interior, |