practically amalgamated with their Dutch neighbours. The Company's government was impartially intolerant, and did not until 1780 permit the establishment of a Lutheran church, although many German Lutherans had settled in the country.

From the time when the settlers began to spread out from the coast into the dry lands of the interior a great change came upon them, and what we now call the distinctive South African type of character and habits began to appear. The first immigrants were not, like some of the English settlers in Virginia, men of good social position in their own country, attached to it by many ties, nor like the English settlers in the New England colonies, men of good education and serious temper, seeking the freedom to worship God in their own way. They came from the humbler classes, and partly because they had few home ties, partly because the voyage to Holland was so long that communication with it was difficult, they maintained little connection with the mother country and soon lost their feeling for it. The Huguenot immigrants were more cultivated, and socially superior to the rude adventurers who had formed the bulk of the Dutch settlers, but they had of course no home country to look to. France had cast them out; Holland was alien in blood and speech. So it befell that of all the colonists that Europe had sent forth since the voyage of Columbus, the South African whites were those who soonest lost their bond with Europe, and were the first set of emigrants to feel themselves a new people, whose

true home lay in the new land they had adopted. Thus early in South African annals were the foundations laid of what we now call the Africander sentiment-a sentiment which has become one of the main factors in the history of the country.

Nor was this all. When the comparatively small area of fertile land which could be cultivated without irrigation had been taken up, the keeping of cattle suggested itself as an easy means of livelihood. The pasture, however, was so thin that it was necessary to graze the cattle over wide stretches of ground, and the farther they went into the interior the scantier was the pasture and the larger therefore did the area of land become over which a farmer let his oxen or sheep run. This process of extending cattle-farms-if farms they can be called-over the interior was materially accelerated through the destruction of the nearer Hottentot tribes by the frightful outbreak of smallpox which began in A.D. 1713, followed by another not less virulent in 1755. The Europeans suffered severely from it, the negroes, slave and free, still more, but the Hottentots most of all. In fact, it cleared them away from all the southern and western parts of the Colony and left these regions open to Europeans. Only the Bushmen remained, whose more solitary life gave them comparative immunity from contagion. Thus from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and during the whole of it, there was a constant dispersion of settlers from the old nucleus into the circumjacent wilderness. They were required to pay a sum

K

amounting to five pounds a year for the use of three thousand morgen (a little more than six thousand acres) of grazing ground, and were accustomed at certain seasons to drive their herds up into the deserts of the Karroo for a change of feed, just after the time when the summer rains stimulate the scrubby vegetation of that desert region. These settlers led a lonely and almost nomadic life. Much of their time was passed in their tent-wagons, in which, with their wives and children, they followed the cattle from spot to spot where the pasture was best. They became excellent marksmen and expert in the pursuit of wild beasts. Some made a living by elephant-hunting in the wilderness, and those who tended cattle learned to face the lion. They were much molested by the Bushmen, whose stealthy attacks and poisoned arrows made them dangerous enemies, and they carried on with the latter a constant war, in which no quarter was given. Thus there developed among them that courage, self-reliance, and passion for independence which are characteristic of the frontiersman everywhere, coupled with a love of solitude and isolation which the conditions of western America did not produce. For in western America the numbers and ferocity of the Red Indians, and those resources of the land which encouraged the formation of agricultural and timber-producing communities, made villages follow the march of discovery and conquest, while in pastoral Africa villages were few and extremely small. Isolation and the wild life these ranchmen led soon

told upon their habits.

The children grew up

ignorant; the women, as was natural where slaves were employed, lost the neat and cleanly ways of their Dutch ancestors; the men were rude, bigoted, indifferent to the comforts and graces of life. But they retained their religious earnestness, carrying their Bibles and the practice of daily family worship with them in their wanderings; and they retained also a passion for freedom which the government vainly endeavoured to restrain. Though magistrates, called landdrosts, were placed in a few of the 'outlying stations, with assessors taken from the people, called heemraden, to assist them in administering justice, it was found impossible to maintain control over the wandering cattle-men, who, from their habit of "trekking" from place to place, were called Trek Boers. The only organization that brought them together was that which their ceaseless strife with the Bushmen enjoined. Being all accustomed to the use of arms, they formed war-parties, which from time to time attacked and rooted out the Bushmen from a disturbed area; and the government recognized these military needs and methods by appointing field-commandants to each district, and subordinate officers, called field-cornets, to each subdistrict. These functionaries have become the basis of the system of local government among the South African Dutch, and the war-bands, called commandos, have played a great part in the subsequent military history of the country.

The eastward progress of expansion presently

brought the settlers into contact with more formidable foes in the Bantu tribes, who dwelt beyond the Great Fish River. In 1779 some Kafir clans of the Kosa race crossed that river and drove off the cattle of the farmers to the west of it, and a war, the first of many fiercely fought Kafir wars, followed, which ended in the victory of the colonists.

All this while the Colony had been ruled by the Dutch East India Company through a governor and council, appointed by the directors in Holland, and responsible to them only-a system roughly similar to that which the English established in India during the eighteenth century. The adminis\tration was better or worse according to the character and capacity of the governor for the time being, but

it was on the whole unpopular with the colonists, ^ not merely because they were excluded from all share in it (except to some small extent in the courts of justice), but also because the Company kept in its own hands a monopoly of the trade, and managed trade with a view to its own commercial interests rather than to those of the community. Thus discontent grew, and this discontent was one of the causes which led to the dispersion of the people into the wilderness, whose remoteness secured to them a practical freedom. In 1779 disaffection had been so much stimulated by the maladministration of a weak governor, and by the news of the revolt of the American colonies against Great Britain, that delegates were sent to Holland to demand redress for their commercial and other grievances, as well