sprang from the lowliest birth in Holland, and has since retrograded beneath its own poor beginning, becoming less enlightened, less cleanly, less gentle, and far less amenable to organisation and discipline.

The Boer thus degraded has lost nothing in courage, it is generally agreed, and has made a distinct advance in self-reliance, strengthening his love of liberty, and license, and independence. The love for loneliness is his strangest trait. That which all other settlers in new lands accept as a hard necessity, but protest against unceasingly, the Boer still seeks, insists upon, and cherishes.

The Dutch made their first South African settlement at the Cape in 1652, and six years later began to bring slaves from other parts, and to press into bondage the natives close around them. All forms of domestic service and industrial labour they put upon these blacks, and thus laid a curse upon South Africa by making it to this day, in all the various States, degrading for a white man to perform manual labour.

To these first settlers there came, thirty-seven years later, three hundred French Huguenots, from among the many who had taken refuge in

Holland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

These new-comers were men and women of far greater refinement and far higher social status, of education and pride, fresh from participation in the foremost civilising forces of their time. They endeavoured to live by themselves, but this effort was frustrated by the Dutch, who, by both force and adroitness, quickly absorbed them. They forbade them the use of their mother tongue, brought them into the Dutch Church, scattered them among their own Dutch communities, and, in time, by intermarriage with them, gained some of the best traits which now endure in the Boer blood.

On the invitation of the Netherlands Government England seized Cape Colony in 1795, and held it seven years, when it was restored to its original rulers. Five years later, the English, who had learned its value as a naval stronghold, seized it again—this time without being invited to do so and in 1814 had it ceded to them upon payment of £6,000,000 to the Dutch Stadtholder.

At this time the Dutch numbered twenty-seven thousand, and owned thirty thousand slaves. English immigrants swelled the population, and

with any other people there would have been almost a certainty of a fusion of the two races, but the Boer, restive and disobedient under all rule, is antagonistic as well when his rulers are not of his own blood.

Their highest aim at all times is to be under their own government, and then to feel as free of it as possible, living by themselves, in widely separated households, each dependent upon his own resources, and fancying himself in the especial care of the Almighty, whose inspired book is the only literature he knows. "Ignorant, prejudiced, strongly attached to their old habits, impatient of any control," is how their character is described by the fairest and most careful of all the Englishmen who have studied them and their history.I

Having forbidden the use of any language except the Dutch, and having re-enforced this law as soon as they gained nationality anew in the Transvaal, they were greatly incensed that English should be chosen as the tongue to be employed in the Cape Colony law courts, and their documents. More keenly still did they

I

James Bryce in "Impressions of South Africa."

resent the endeavours of the English to protect the natives against their proverbial cruelty.

It was to be expected that a peasantry which had stagnated for two centuries would not understand or sympathise with the English abhorrence of slavery; and in fact out of this, and the Englishman's determination to protect the natives against Boer cruelty, arose that hatred of the Briton which has waxed stronger in the Boer heart, until to-day the commonest name they give to an Englishman is "rotten egg," and the politest phrase by which they differentiate him from a Boer is "redneck."

They had been refractory, and at times mutinous, under the government of their own people. They remained so under the rule to which their own people handed them over, or sold them. It was in 1834 that Parliament passed an Act freeing all slaves in the British dominions all over the world, and thus added the somewhat weighty straw which broke the back of Boer endurance.

The compensation granted to the slaveholders under the flag was inadequate, and though as much was allotted to South Africa as fell to slaveowners in other colonies, this fact did not serve to mitigate the added grievance to the Boers.

Many writers grant them a greater or less measure of sympathy, but in absolute candour it must be said that this is principally based upon the fact that the English methods of dealing with the black races differed from their own, and to sympathise with them must necessarily be to disparage nineteenth-century principles of justice.

The Boers enslaved the native, and treated him harshly both in slavery, and in their relations with him in his wild state. Their cruelty was spied upon and reported by British missionaries, and punished by the Government; then Boer quarrels and conflicts with the natives gained for the blacks the protection of the English, and finally their slaves were set free, in common with all slaves held under the British flag.

Upon these statements both sides agree, and it seems that the only sympathy we can feel for the Boers is that which they continue to deserve-that which belongs to men of seventeenth-century ways, who find themselves three centuries behind the ideas and influences which hedge them round.

Had the Boers been people of noble nature, of fine instincts, kindly, and with high and broad aspirations, had they redeemed, or even made an effort to redeem, a great wilderness, and put it in