The Project Gutenberg eBook, Thoughts on South Africa, by Olive Schreiner

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

A list of corrections can be found at the [end of the document].

THOUGHTS ON
SOUTH AFRICA

OTHER BOOKS BY
OLIVE SCHREINER

STORIES, DREAMS AND ALLEGORIES
DREAMS
DREAM LIFE AND REAL LIFE
TROOPER PETER HALKET
WOMAN AND LABOUR

T. Fisher Unwin Ltd London

THOUGHTS ON
SOUTH AFRICA

BY

OLIVE SCHREINER

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1923

(All rights reserved)

To
MY HUSBAND
THESE STRAY THOUGHTS ON THE LAND WE BOTH LOVE
ARE INSCRIBED BY HIS WIFE
OLIVE CRONWRIGHT SCHREINER

Hanover,
Cape Colony,
October 11, 1901.

FOREWORD

"Stray thoughts on South Africa, by a Returned South African" (as they were originally entitled) were left by my late wife almost exactly as they now appear.

She went to England for the first time early in 1881 and returned to South Africa towards the end of 1889. Cape Town not suiting her asthmatic chest, it was not long after her return that she made Matjesfontein her home. Matjesfontein is a railway-station on the main line, 195 miles from Cape Town and 2,955 feet above the sea-level. The climate suited her on the whole, and Cape Town,—where her family, friends and social interests were,—was not too far away. Here she leased a cottage which Mr. Logan, the owner of the little village and the large hotel, called "Schreiner Cottage."

It was here apparently that most of the "Stray Thought" articles were written (as well as "Our Waste Land in Mashonaland," which is included in this volume). This would be from 1890 to somewhere towards the end of 1892; for she again went to England in 1893, returning the same year.

The first article (Chapter I), dealing chiefly with the natural features of South Africa, was published in the Cape Times, Cape Town, as a "(Revised Edition)" on the 18th August, 1891, with the footnote "(To be continued in The Fortnightly Review)," and the last (Chapter VI) in 1900. The first five chapters appeared, as far as my knowledge goes, some of them in The Fortnightly Review, others in Cosmopolis, and the sixth chapter in The Cosmopolitan. The last chapter on "The Englishman," which many will regard as the most remarkable part of this volume, has not been published before, and was apparently never revised; it was written so hurriedly that I had to type it myself, and only with great difficulty; the manuscript starts abruptly on a page numbered 3. A proposed chapter on the Native Races was never written. "The Domestic Life of the South African Boer" appeared in The Youth's Companion in November, 1899. It is not a part of "Stray Thoughts," but, from its nature, seems to find a fitting place in this book. "Our Waste Land in Mashonaland" appeared in the Cape Times, simply as "Communicated," on August 26th, 1891. The Dedication, the Introduction, and the other Notes have not hitherto been published.

All the articles were carefully revised by her, as also the above-mentioned unpublished matter, except Chapter VIII. It will be seen from the "Notes" that she was occupied with them at intervals, and, from the Prefatory Note, that she intended to publish them in 1896 soon after the Jameson Raid.

About this time, however, she began to write Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, which absorbed her time and attention to the exclusion of the "Stray Thoughts." She and I went to England in 1897, when she published Peter Halket. Not long after our return we went to Johannesburg and lived there until some little time before the Boer War started. Subsequently, on account of bad health, her doctor ordered her to leave. The Boer War and the distressing state of things in South Africa resulting therefrom, coupled with her ill-health and then the European War and the almost complete breakdown of her health, account largely, no doubt, for the non-publication of these Thoughts on South Africa.

S. C. CRONWRIGHT-SCHREINER.

Krantz Plaats, 6 Camden Street,

Tamboers Kloof, Cape Town.

PREFATORY NOTE

These articles were written four years ago; the first, a description of South African scenery, appeared in The Fortnightly Review at that time.

The rest did not follow. This was owing to the fact that there were at the Cape at that time certain parties and persons who, using the Boers of South Africa for their own purpose, yet pandered to them that they might ultimately more successfully obtain their own ends.

These papers, written by one who had for years lived among the Boers, sharing their daily life and understanding their language, of necessity attempt to delineate, not only the coarse external shell of the Boer, but the finer fibred kernel within, which those whose contact with him is superficial never see; and while dwelling at great length upon the one great flaw which mars the relation of the Boer with his fellow men in South Africa, these papers are of necessity sympathetic in their treatment of him.

Now, it appeared not well, at a time when certain men in South Africa were bending down to press their cheek against the heel of any pair of vel-schoens that might pass them, that any English voice should be raised which spoke in kindly tones of the Boer, lest the voice of the sympathizer should blend with and be mistaken for that of the flatterer.

It was certain that the time would come when again the Boer would stand in need of just treatment at the hands of Englishmen; and these papers were therefore put aside.

That time has come.

The Boer has been struck a sore blow by the hand that stroked him; and again it is necessary that he, with his antique faults and his heroic virtues, should be shown to the world as he is.

Therefore these papers, which make an attempt to delineate him in such guise as he lives, are now printed. They have been left as they stood save for the addition of a few foot-notes.

OLIVE SCHREINER.

The Homestead, Kimberley,

South Africa.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

As a rule, the book which requires a preface of explanation is a book better not written, and better not read.

But certain parts of this book have appeared in periodicals and have caused, no doubt owing to the fragmentary nature of their publication, some misconceptions which it might be worth while setting right.

It has been stated by some kindly critic that the subject of this little book was a valuable history of South Africa, while another has suggested my calling it "The History of the Boer."

Nothing has been farther from my thought than the writing of any history. In a far different manner I should have equipped myself had it been my intention to do so. Dr. Theal, in his History of South Africa, has collected as carefully and dealt as ably with the mere historical incidents of the last two hundred years as it is possible for any one person, in the course of one life, and from one point of view, to do.

Still less, as has been suggested, was it my intention to write a homily on South African problems and people.

This little book is something far less pretentious, and wholly different.

Born in South Africa, I felt from my childhood a wish to set down what I thought and felt about my native land. After I was grown up, but in my youth, I went to Europe for ten years, living in London but visiting the Continent continually.

When at the end of those ten years I came back to my native land, it was with an even added interest that I looked at its people and its problems and its physical features, and the wish became stronger to jot down what I thought and felt with regard to it.

This little book is the gratification of that wish.

It is not a history, it is not a homily, it is not a political brochure—it is simply what one South African at the end of the nineteenth century thought, and felt, with regard to his native land: thought and felt with regard to its peoples, its problems and its scenery—it is nothing more than this; but it is also nothing less.

I do not think, simple as such a book is, it need be necessarily quite without interest for any but the writer.

I myself should like to know, apart from what the learned historians have to say, and apart from the views of passing travellers who have lived a few years in the country, and who therefore have never seen its life below the surface—I should like to know just what one ordinary Chinaman feels and thinks, or does not feel and think, with regard to his native land at the end of the nineteenth century. I should like to know just what he sincerely thinks of its pig-tails and its tea plantations, what he feels to its scenery on the banks of the Yangtsekiang, and in its northern mountain regions, and exactly how its pagodas, and its Mongolian dynasty, and the position of its women, and its flowers, and even its stiff gardens, strike him. I should be interested to know just what he feels towards its complex peoples, and the foreigners; what he hopes for its future, and how he regards its past. His views might not always be correct, perhaps not often, but as long as they were sincerely his, set down to please no one and to grieve no one, but because they were his, they would have a certain interest for me. It would be the picture of only one John Chinaman—what he thought and felt towards his land, a purely personal document, but it might have a certain value!

Whatever value attaches to this little book is of this kind only. It is a personal document.

Had I the health to carry out my plans and to write somewhat in detail of what I think and feel with regard to our English folk in Africa, and above all of our Natives and their problems and difficulties, the little book might have had a certain rotundity; now it is a broken segment only. Nor should I publish it now were it not at the request of many friends; for I am unable adequately to revise even this segment.

There is also one insignificant matter I should like to notice. It has been said I love the African Boer. That is true. But it has been given as a reason for my doing so that I share his blood, and that is not true. One could not belong to a more virile folk, but I have no drop of Dutch blood.

My father was a South German, born in Würtemberg, who studied at Basel, and when only twenty-one years old came to London, where he married my mother, of purely English blood; and together with her came to Africa as a missionary about the year 1836.[1] My training was exclusively and strongly English. I did not begin learning any other language till I was eight and have never gained the complete mastery of any other. It is my mother speech and England is my mother land.

Neither do I owe it to early training that I value my fellow South Africans of Dutch descent. I started in life with as much insular prejudice and racial pride as it is given to any citizen who has never left the little Northern Island to possess. I cannot remember ever being exactly instructed in these matters by any one, rather, I suppose, I imbibed my view as boys coming to a town where there are two rival schools imbibe a prejudice towards the boys of the other school, without ever being definitely instructed on the matter. I cannot remember a time when I was not profoundly convinced of the superiority of the English, their government and their manners, over all other peoples.

One of my earliest memories is of walking up and down on the rocks behind the little Mission House in which I was born and making believe that I was Queen Victoria and that all the world belonged to me. That being the case, I ordered all the black people in South Africa to be collected and put into the desert of Sahara, and a wall built across Africa shutting it off; I then ordained that any black person returning south of that line should have his head cut off. I did not wish to make slaves of them, but I wished to put them where I need never see them, because I considered them ugly. I do not remember planning that Dutch South Africans should be put across the wall, but my objection to them was only a little less.

I cannot have been more than four years old when a Boer family outspanned their ox-wagon on the veld near our mission house. As I was walking past it a little girl of about my own age, wearing, like myself, a great white cotton kapje, climbed off the trap at the back of the wagon and came towards me holding out her hand. In it was a little fistful of dark-brown sugar, a treat to up-country children in the wilds where sweetmeats were rare. She held it out to me without saying a word. I was too polite to refuse to take it, but, as soon as I had gone a few steps, I opened my hand behind me and let it drop. To have eaten sugar that had been in the hand of a Boer child would have been absolutely impossible to me. Often, in later years, I have seen those two small figures standing there in the African afternoon sunshine in their great white kapjes, as in a way allegoric of the whole relation between the Anglo-Saxon and the Boer in South Africa.

It was about the same time that a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, but a Scotchman by descent, came to spend a night at our station. The accommodation of an up-country mission house is limited, and I had to give him up my bed. On the night following when bedtime came I inquired if fresh sheets had been put on my bed; on being told they had not and that the clergyman had only slept in them one night and I might well use them, I absolutely refused to get in. Nothing, I said, would ever induce me to sleep between sheets a Dutchman had slept between. It was in vain it was protested he was not a Dutchman though called a Dutch minister; I was resolute and passed the night on the outside of the quilt.

These trivial facts are not wholly without interest as showing the possible mental attitude of the members of one society towards each other if divided by race; and they will, I think, serve to show that whatever sympathy I have felt with my fellow South Africans of other races is not the result of early bias or training.

I remember it as often a subject of thought within myself at this time, why God had made us, the English, so superior to all other races, and, while feeling it was very nice to belong to the best people on earth, having yet a vague feeling that it was not quite just of God to have made us so much better than all the other nations. I have only to return to the experiences of my early infancy to know what the most fully developed Jingoism means.

Later on, my feeling for the Boer changed, as did, later yet, my feeling towards the native races; but this was not the result of any training, but simply of an increased knowledge.

When I was six years old, on a long journey from one part of South Africa to another, our wagon outspanned at a Boer's farm and we spent a day and a night there. I must often have visited a Boer farm-house before, but this visit made a curiously deep impression on me, from which I date the beginning of that consciousness of a certain political charm about the Boer and his life, which has never left me. The orange trees before the door, the first I had ever seen, with their sweet-scented leaves; the great clean, bare "voorhuis" (front room) with its mud floors and its chairs and sofa with reimpje[2] seats; the good old mother with her good-natured smile, sitting in her elbow chair, with her coffee table at her side and her feet on a stove; the little shy children, who, as I could not speak Dutch nor they English, brought me silently their little toys and patchwork to look at and who were so anxious to be friendly (some of these children are now, I believe, languishing as political prisoners in English prisons!); the strange cool stillness of the air next morning when we rose at dawn to continue our journey; the bleating of the sheep in the kraals, where the farmer's sons had already gone to count them out; the great blue mountain behind the house, with the still deep blue shadow beneath the krantzes[3] on its top; and the farm-house becoming a small white speck with the orange trees before the door as our wagon crept away in the early light—all this made a profound impression on me; and I am conscious that I began to feel even then that charm which the still, free, simple life of the Boer on his land has since had for me.

Living in another part of Africa, three years later, it was my duty every morning to go to a Boer farm-house, about a mile off, to fetch milk. Not more pleasant in my memory is the scent of the quince hedges I had to pass, or the rushing between its stepping-stones of the river I had to cross, than of the little daub-and-wattle house of two rooms, with its mud floors and green windows, with the good old mother, very stout, sitting always in her elbow-chair beside the little coffee-table however early I came, and the great buxom daughters bustling about, while the little bare-foot children ran off to the kraal with my pail to fill it. They were the poorest class of by-woners (persons who have no land of their own and live on the land of others), and the little front room with its mud floor was often very full of flies in the summer, but the African sunshine fell across the floor from one open door to the other; and the good old mother used to make me sit on the stove at her feet, and smiled good-temperedly at my shy attempts to answer her questions in Dutch, of which I could at that time speak only a few broken words; and sometimes she gave me a carnation or a bit of pietercillie from her garden. The little house with its inhabitants were all objects of interest and sympathy to me. But I am not at all sure that, small shy person that I was, I did not even then still regard myself as a person belonging to a quite superior race, surveying them as it were from a height with sympathetic interest.

It was at this time that I began to study the history of the Boers and the story of Slachters Nek, of the valiant stand made by Bezuidenhout's wife; and the sufferings and wrongs of the old Fore-trekkers were often in my thoughts. I was convinced that, had I lived at the time of Slachters Nek, I would have saved the lives of those five men, even at the risk of my own; I would have gone to the Governor, I would have moved heaven and earth, I would have been a kind of Paladin redressing the wrongs of the Boer, and I almost regretted that I had not been born in those dark times that I might have lived for, and if necessary have died for, him. But still I did not really know the Boer; he was only a far-off object of pity and sympathy.

It was some years later that I was first thrown into close personal contact with the South African Boer.

For five years I lived among them as a teacher on their farms, sometimes among the more cultured, and sometimes among the more primitive but not one whit less lovable and intelligent, class. Sometimes for eighteen months I did not see an English face and was brought into the closest mental contact with them which is possible—the mental contact between teacher and taught. Watching them in all the vicissitudes of life, from birth to marriage and death, I learnt to love the Boer, but more, I learnt to admire him. I learnt that in the African Boer we have one of the most intellectually virile and dominant races the world has seen; a people who beneath a calm and almost stolid surface hide the intensest passions and the most indomitable resolution. Among the peoples of Europe I have been thrown into contact with, the Swiss and the Tyrolese of remote Alpine villages most resemble the African Boer; but there is a certain quiet but high-spirited indomitableness and an unlimited power of self-control which is characteristic of the average Boer man and above all the average Boer woman, which I have not met with in an equal degree in any other races, though individuals in all races may be found possessing it, and certain Boers of course have it not.

It has been asked me more than once, on what ground I based the statement made before the present war began, in papers futilely written in the hope of preventing it, that, if England made war on the Republics, she would have to send out at least one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers to attack these small states, and that even then there was a possibility that the red African mier-kat might ultimately creep back into its hole in the red African earth, torn and bleeding, but alive—it has been asked how I came to form this opinion, when military authorities, keen financiers and politicians held that at most twenty thousand soldiers and a few months would see the Republics crushed.

To this I have only one answer. I based my statement on my knowledge of the character of the Boer men, but above all of the Boer women. The measure of its women is ultimately the measure of any people's strength and resistile power. With the mother of the Gracchi, the Roman Republic in its might and vitality: with the effete Roman woman of a later period, the decadent Empire. The heart of the Boer woman is the true citadel of her people; and while that remains unbroken, though every city be taken and every village and farm-house burnt, the people is yet to crush.

I have been blamed for an excessive love of the race, and an unwillingness to see its faults: but I hardly think this is true.

The Boer has to the full the defects of his qualities; that scintillating intellectual brilliance and versatility, so common and so charming in the Frenchman and the Irishman, the Boer, even when highly cultured, seldom has: he is deep and strong rather than broad and brilliant: indomitable when he does act, it takes much to rouse him into action; he is slow and often heavy. And the Boer race has its Judases, as all other races have; nor do I know of a more sorrowful sight than the descendant of the old Boer, speaking English often with so foreign an accent as to be laughable, yet playing the part of the extreme Anglo-Saxon; losing thereby the charms of the Boer without attaining to the magnificent virtues which are characteristic of the best Englishman. But these persons are fortunately rare; and behind them lies the great, solid, self-respecting mass of the Dutch South African people.

I do not appraise, as has been said, the Boer as higher or more valuable than other human varieties. A dogmatic statement as to the respective values of human varieties, or even of races, has always appeared to me, since I passed out of my infantile state of ignorance, as impossible. Each race has its virtues and the deficiencies which are complemental to its virtues, and the loss of any one race would be to me the falling of a star from the human galaxy.

When one travels in Italy and sees its harmoniously featured people, and views that plastic art which the Italian alone has given the world in many of its noblest forms, and realizes the vast debt under which all the world rests to the Italian race for its influence on the fourteenth-century renaissance, and remembers the list of the mighty dead from Michael Angelo to Dante, one so considering the land and its people is inclined to say that it would be well to barter any folk to preserve Italy and her gifts to humanity. But when one crosses the Alps and enters quaint German villages with their simple folk and treads on the soil which was the birth-land of the Goethes and Kants and Beethovens and Luthers, who are the world's wealth as well as Germany's, when one considers that vast army of intellectual labourers who have made the name German synonymous with the search after knowledge and truth for truth's sake; when one walks through the Rhine provinces with their sunshine, their vines, and their music, and their stalwart men and fair-faced women, with their German truth of heart, then it may be forgiven one who has any German blood in his veins if he feels inclined to seize a flag as children do and walk about waving it and crying, "I am a German! This is my Fatherland!"

But should one cross the Rhine and live among that folk on the other side, so old in their civilization, so keenly alive, who have suffered in the search for freedom, and are so capable of abandoning all for a lofty ideal; when one considers Paris, that queen among the cities in beauty and in tragedy, her people scintillating with intellect and an opalescent life always varying, then one is inclined to say, "Take all, but leave us France, the right eye of the world!"

And yet, should one cross to little Switzerland and little Holland, where one knows one stands on ground made sacred in past ages as the battle-ground where mighty empires which sought to crush freedom were repelled, and studies that virile folk, one is inclined to exclaim, "There would be nothing more grand than to belong to one of these small heroic great peoples," and one thanks the gods they have existed.

Yet, further, if one turns to the northern peninsulas where in their greatest purity are to be found our fair northern races, and where the sons of the Sea Kings seem to have retained into these later times among their fjords and frozen forests much of the charm and freshness which we dream of as belonging to our own old northern ancestors, a charm which lives for ever in their great northern Saga, the loftiest song of battle and the deepest of the love of man and woman that the world has heard, one is not surprised that sons of Scandinavia send out into the world to-day works of genius which conquer its thought as their forefathers conquered the bodies of the men of the ancient world; one feels that, were the Scandinavian race obliterated, a northern aurora would have faded.[4]

While, if one turns one's eyes to the great northland in whose people Europe and Asia mingle, and studies their strangely virile and intense literature and their characters, in which the lion and the lamb are so strangely blended, and men willing to die rather than exercise any form of force towards their fellows are found side by side with those who know of no governing power but the knout; when one watches this great, strange, strong, gentle, fierce folk, so yet unexhausted, one is strangely drawn towards it and compelled to recognize that the Russian is not merely physically but intellectually one of the mighty modifying forces of the future.

So, if one crosses the sea to the little island of fogs and mists, it may be forgiven to one who has its people's blood in his veins, if, having well studied its people in their past and their present, their heights and their depths, he should say, as the Jew has a right to say of his nation—"If we are the worst of humanity, we are also of its best!" For, like the Jew, if we English have sordid racial vices we have magnificent virtues; and we resemble him in this, that those very vices which most mark our national character and by which we are known throughout the earth, are the very qualities of which our greatest men and our noblest elements are the negation. As the Jew, marked everywhere by his devotion to material gain and the thirst for wealth, has yet, in his loftiest men of genius, realized the height of spirituality and the negation of all subjection to the sensuous; so we—the English folk, known throughout the world for our greed of power and pelf, and as tending always to cloak our self-seeking from our own eyes and from that of the world with a mantle of assumed virtue: a tendency which has made the name of England synonymous with hypocrisy and perfidy throughout the world—yet possess, in our greatest men and our ethically developed class, a body of individuals whose lives and ideals are a superb opposition to these qualities. Beside the sordid gold-seeker, financial speculator, land grabber and buccaneer, stand our Shelley and our Milton; beside the millions who use philanthropy as a means of self-gratification and a cloak to greed and ambition, are thousands with whom it is a heroic reality. Without any national prejudice may one not say that no people in the world ever possessed a section more determined to see things nakedly as they are, and, whether personally or nationally, to prefer justice to self-interest, than a section of our English people? Have there ever been statesmen in any land who have more fearlessly denounced injustice and oppression, not merely when exercised towards their own nation but by it, than Burke and Chatham when they raised their voices to oppose George the Third supported by the bulk of the English nation in their attempt to crush freedom in America? If no nation has more misrepresented, neglected and persecuted its sons of light, no nation has had more of them to persecute. If Dante's dream were a reality, mayhap we should find in that lowest hell, among the sad multitudes walking round continually with iron weights upon their heads, that every third man was an Englishman; but we should also scale to no heaven so high that in the highest circle among the brightest spirits we should not find the sons and daughters of the damp little isle. If ten righteous would have saved a city once, shall not a nation be saved by ten millions? Shall it not be counted for righteousness to our stock-jobbers and priests and politicians, who, tongue buried in cheek, talk of spreading Christianity and enlightenment, when he means exploitation and destruction, that he belongs to a race thousands of whose men and women do sincerely desire those things which he affects? When the great Jew raised over his native city his mighty cry of—"O Jerusalem"—was it not proved by that very cry itself that sons of light were born even in her degenerate bosom? Was it not something that she gave birth to the prophets whom she killed and stoned?

It may be allowed any man who has English blood in his veins to feel that he can never fall in the gulf of insincerity and egoism but he shall have millions of his fellow countrymen about him, but also that there are no heights of sincerity and humanity towards which he may aspire which thousands of his race have not attained; that he belongs to a branch of the human race which, if it has given birth to some of the most sordid and crumpled of human blooms, has also borne on it the fairest of fruit.

Even if one turn to the despised African races, one finds, with much that is immature and childlike, much that is gracious and charming. That very strength of social instinct which characterises so many of them, to whom the social organism is all, the individual composing it so little, far removed as it is from our individualized Northern standpoint, may it not yet have its aspects of value and its lessons for humanity? The very Bushman, so little socialized, and standing almost on the border-line between the creature that speaks whom we call man and the creature that thinks and feels without speaking whom we call beast, that he has something of the attraction of both, would we be without him? And may one not well be glad one was not born so late in the order of life that one never saw him? And one who has not personally known the Jap, the Chinaman, the Indian, the Afghan, the Spaniard, the Esquimo and the Turk, may well regret that the shortness of human life has made it impossible for him to love and study them all in their own habitats?

In truth, I am unable to conceive of the varieties and species into which the human race has divided itself as other than varied flowers in the garden of the gods on earth, of which the loss of one would be heavy. In my own garden I desire to see grow all species and kinds of flowers, the rose, the rhododendron, the violet and the orchid and the cactus on the rocks. And I love the purple-eyed periwinkle as well as any plant; only if it spreads inordinately and threatens to choke all the others do I say, "It is a weed; pull it up and circumscribe it!"

OLIVE SCHREINER.

Hanover,

Cape of Good Hope, 1901.

Thoughts on South Africa

CHAPTER I
SOUTH AFRICA: ITS NATURAL FEATURES, ITS DIVERSE PEOPLES, ITS POLITICAL STATUS: THE PROBLEM

There are artists who, loving their work, when they have finished it, put it aside for years, that, after the lapse of time, returning to it and reviewing it from the standpoint of distance, they may judge of it in a manner which was not possible while the passion of creation and the link of unbroken emotion bound them to it.

What the artist does intentionally, life often does for us fortuitously in other relationships.

It may be questioned whether a man has ever been able to form an adequate conception of his mother's face in its relation to others, till after long years of absence he has returned to it, and, whether he will or no, there flashes on him the consciousness of its beauty, nobility, weariness, or age as compared with that of others; a thing which was not possible to him, when it rose for him every morning as the sun, and mingled itself with all the experiences of his day.

What is true of the personal mother is yet more true of the man's native land. It has shaped all his experiences; it has lain as the background to all his consciousness; it has modified his sensations and emotions. He can no more pass a calm, relative judgment on it, than an artist can upon the work he is creating, or a child at the breast can analyze the face above it. The incapacity of peoples to pass judgments on the surroundings from which they have never been separated is familiar to every traveller. The mayor of the little German town does not take you to see the costumes of the peasants, nor the old church, nor the Dürer over the altar; but drags you away to see the new row of gas-lamps in the village street. The costumes, the church, the picture are unique in Europe and the world; better gas-lamps flame before every butcher's shop in London and Paris; but the lamps are new and have cost him much; he cannot view them objectively. The inhabitant of one of the rarest and fairest towns in the colonies or on earth does not boast to you of his oaks and grapes, or ask you what you think of his mountain, or explain to you the marvellous mixture of races in his streets; but he is anxious to know what you think of his docks and small public buildings. He has not the emotional detachment necessary for the forming of a large critical judgment. A certain distance is necessary to the seeing of great wholes clearly. It is not by any chance that the most scientific exposition of American Democracy is the work of a Frenchman, that the best history of the French Revolution is by an Englishman, or that the finest history of English literature is the work of a Frenchman. Distance is essential for a keen, salient survey, which shall take in large outlines and mark prominent characteristics.

It is customary to ridicule the traveller who passes rapidly through a country, and then writes his impression of it. The truth is he sees much that is hidden for ever from the eyes of the inhabitants. Habit and custom have blinded them. They are indignant when it is said that their land is arid, that it has few running streams, that its population is scanty, and that vegetables are scarce; and they are amused and surprised when he discants for three pages on the glorious rarity of their air, and the scientific interest of their mingled peoples: yet these are the prominent external features which differentiate their land from all others.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the people of a country are justified in their contempt of the bird's-eye view of the stranger. There is a certain knowledge of a land which is only to be gained by one born in it, or brought into long-continued, close, personal contact with it, and which in its perfection is perhaps never obtained by any man with regard to a country which he has not inhabited before he was thirty. It is the subjective emotional sympathy with its nature, and the comprehension not merely of the vices and virtues of its people, but of the how and why of their existence, which is possible to a man only with regard to a country that is more or less his own. The stranger sees the barren scene, but of the emotion which that barren mountain is capable of awakening in the man who lives under its shadow he knows nothing. He marks the curious custom, but of the social condition which originated it, and the passions concerned in its maintenance, he understands absolutely nothing.

This subtle, sympathetic, subjective knowledge of a land and people is that which is essential to the artist, and to the great leader of men. Without it no artist has ever greatly portrayed a land or a people, no great statesman or reformer has ever led or guided a nation or race. To Balzac nothing was easier than to paint the Paris boarding-house. All the united intellect and genius of Europe could not have painted it if the grimy respectability of those chairs and tables, the sordid narrowness of the faded human lives, had not eaten first into their own substance, emotionally. To a Gladstone nothing is easier than to make a speech which shall move five thousand Scotchmen to madness. No foreigner could do it. He might lay out the arguments as well. He could not put out his hand and touch chord after chord of national emotion and passion, producing what sound he would. The knowledge of these chords, and of the manner of touching them, is possible only to a man within whom they potentially exist.

Both forms of knowledge are essential to the true understanding of a country. And if it may be said that no man understands a thing till he has coldly criticized it, it may also be said that no man knows a thing till he has loved it.

If the perfunctory views in the following pages have any claim to interest or attention, it rises not in any degree from any special aptitude in the writer for discussing the questions dealt with—for none such exists; but from the chance coincidence of fortunate circumstances, which give to a man born and growing up in a land which he loves, as a man loves one land once, and who returns to it after many years' absence in other lands, a somewhat two-fold position. Half he is outsider; half he is lover. It is only the thought that this position may possibly yield in itself a certain slight interest, which overcomes that natural diffidence which a man feels in dealing with subjects so vital, complex, and large that the opinion of any individual upon them must be of necessity tentative and limited in value, and stand in need of large correction.

For the right understanding of the South African people and their problem, the first requisite is a clear comprehension of their land.

Taking the term South Africa to include all the country south from the Zambesi and Lake N'gami to Cape Agulhas, it may be said that few territories possess more varied natural features; nevertheless, through it all, from Walfish Bay to Algoa Bay, from the Zambesi to Cape Town, there is in it a certain unity. No South African set down in any part of it could fail to recognize it as his native land; and he could hardly mistake any other for it.

The most noticeable feature in first looking at it, is the strip of lowland country running along the entire south and east coast, and bordered everywhere inland by high mountain ranges.

In the Western Province the coast belt consists of chains of huge mountains forming a network over a tract of country some hundreds of miles in extent, the mountains having at their feet level valleys or small plains. They are composed of igneous though stratified rock, covered by little soil, and showing signs of titanic subterranean action; many of them seem to have been hurled up by one convulsive act; bare strata of rock thousands of feet in extent are raised on end, their jagged edges forming the summits of vast mountain ranges. In the still, peaceful valleys at the feet of these mountains are running streams; in the spring the African heath covers them with red, pink and white bells, and the small wine-farms dot the sides of the valleys with their white houses and green fields, dwarfed under the high, bare mountains. Here and there are little towns and villages, built as only the old Dutch-Huguenots knew how to build, the long, straight streets lined with trees on either hand, and streams of water running down them; and the old thatch-roofed, gabled, white-washed, green-shuttered houses standing back, with their stone stoeps,[5] under the deep shade of the trees, and with their vineyards and orchards behind them. No one can build such towns now. They are as unique as their mountains.

Perhaps one sees the Western Province to best advantage in the Hex River Valley, with its mountains of solid rock rising up thousands of feet on either hand, the vast strata contorted into fantastic shapes, and below them the smiling valley with its sprinkling of wine-farms. Hardly less characteristic is Cape Town itself, the capital of the Province and of the whole Colony, which lies on its promontory at the extreme end of the continent. In a valley between two mountains, one high, flat and of pure rock, its stupendous front overhanging the town, the other lower and rounded, its cliff worn away everywhere but on one mighty head which it rears into the blue, the town lies, with its flat-roofed houses and long straight streets, on a bay as blue and delicately curved as that of Naples.

Here it was that the wandering Hottentots on the shore saw the first sails creep across the waters of their blue bay. Here it was that in 1652 Jan Anthony van Riebeek, the servant of the Dutch East Indian Company, landed with his dependents and built the first houses and made the first gardens. The fort which they built in those early days may still be seen near the sea shore; the small block-houses which you may still see on the spurs of the mountain, a disputed tradition says, were used in those days as outlook towers against the incursions of possible foes.

Here the Dutch East Indian Company imported its slaves, often from Madagascar, English slave-ships bringing them. Here, Peter Kolben tells us that, about the year 1712, he saw a slave burnt to death. They are, says he, speaking of the slaves, "most detestable and wicked wretches," and "'tis now and then a most difficult thing to keep them in order." This slave had tried to burn down his master's house; they tied him to an upright post by a chain which allowed him to make one turn about it. "Then," said Peter Kolben, "was kindled a fire round about him, just beyond the stretch of the chain; the flames rose high; the heat was vehement; he ran for some time to-and-again about the post, but gave not one cry. Being half roasted he sank down, and said (speaking in Portuguese), Dios mio Pays (O God, my Father), and then expired."

These things have passed away now, as the elephant and hippopotami have passed from the slopes of Table Mountain, and the thumb-screw and the rack and stake from Europe, and as other things will pass away yet.

For ten miles along the foot of the mountains stretch the suburbs of Cape Town, villa and garden, and pine and oak avenue mingling themselves in endless succession. Here it seems a man might dream away his life, buried in roses and plumbago, and forget that pain and care existed.

Perhaps one of the finest views in the world is that from the top of the Kloof behind Cape Town. To your right is Table Mountain, one of the sublimest masses of solid matter in the world; below are the pine woods and the town, with its white, flat houses, and, beyond the blue curved bay and Blue-Berg Strand, the mountains of Hottentot's Holland, with a canopy of clouds appearing and receding again into the blue sky. As you turn, behind you is the blue South Atlantic as far as the eye can reach, and the terrible serrated peaks of the Twelve Apostles stand facing it, peak beyond peak, as they have stood for endless ages, with the sea breaking in the little bays at their feet.

The population of the Western Province is partly English and partly Boer or Dutch-Huguenot, the descendants of the Dutch East Indian Company's servants and settlers, and of a large number of French Huguenots who arrived in the Colony about 1687, driven from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who, winnowed by the unerring flail of religious persecution, form, perhaps, the finest element that has ever been added to the population of South Africa. The labouring classes are, as elsewhere in South Africa, coloured, and here largely half-castes, the descendants of the first Dutch residents and their slaves, or much more rarely of blended Dutch and Hottentot blood. In Cape Town itself are found also Malays, Chinamen, Hindus, and the representatives of all European nations.

If leaving Cape Town we go a few hundred miles eastward, along the coast, we shall find the lowland belt assume new characteristics. The hills, though high, are softer and more rounded, covered completely with soil and grass; or their sides, and even summits, are clothed in bush, stretching for ten or twenty or forty miles. This bush is neither forest nor scrub. In the valleys of high mountains, or along the beds of watercourses, it becomes true forest, of vast, thick-stemmed, timber-producing trees; monkey-ropes thicker than a man's arm hang down from the branches, and there is forest shade. But, in the main, South Africa bush is composed of creeper-like bushes, sometimes attaining forty feet in height, and of many hollow-skinned succulent plants, aloe, elephant's food, euphorbia, which often attain the height of tall trees, but are of so light a structure that cut down a child may drag them. Sometimes the bush grows more or less continuously, the clumps and bushes being merely intersected everywhere by what seem like little dry paths.

But in its most characteristic form the bush consists of large isolated clumps of vegetation. The kunee, a vast creeper-like tree, whose interlaced branches, touching the ground everywhere, forming beehive-shaped masses, looking like immense Kaffir huts, often, though not always, forms the foundation of these masses; around it spring up elephant's food, namnam, geraniums and plumbago, and perhaps a tall euphorbia tree, with its cactus-like leaves, shoots up into the air through it. These clumps of vegetation, sometimes almost solid, and often forty or fifty feet in circumference, are divided from others by spaces of short, smooth grass, generally brown except after the early rains.

In this bush it is particularly easy to lose yourself. As you pass round clump after clump, there are always others of exactly the same shape before you, and you sometimes find you have gone two or three times round the same mass of vegetation. Oxen once lost in this bush are not easily discovered for days, though hidden behind the next clump, and it is almost hopeless to look for them unless one can gain an eminence and oversee a wide stretch of country. In this bush several Europeans have lost their lives during the last fifteen years.

It is the peculiar home of the great scarlet geranium now common in English hot-houses, and of the delicate, blue, star-like plumbago, and of endless ferns; but the heaths and bulbs of the Western Province are not found here.

Eighty years ago it was alive with elephant, lion, bush-buck, and wild animals of all kinds. Now, the elephant is extinct, except where artificially preserved; bush-buck are scarce; a few large leopards may still be found in sequestered kloofs, and wild cats and monkeys and parrots are yet abundant, but a lion has not been seen for forty years. Thousands of small birds feed on the berries that abound here, and fifty small birds may sometimes be heard chirping in the depths of one kunee tree.

Eighty years ago, the inhabitants of this tract were warlike Kaffir tribes of the Bantu race. They have not been exterminated as the Hottentots and Bushmen in the west have largely been, but are still found as the servants on farms and in towns. The white inhabitants at the present day are mainly English, the descendants largely of a group of emigrants who landed here in 1820, and who proved themselves one of the most entirely successful and satisfactory bodies of emigrants whom England has ever sent forth.

Here and there throughout the entire tract are scattered small English towns and villages; and thriving farms, where sheep and agriculture go together, are hidden away in the bush.

To see this land typically one should outspan one's wagon on the top of a height on a hot summer's day, when not a creature is stirring, and the sun pours down its rays on the flaccid, dust-covered leaves of the bushes. When the leader has gone to take the oxen to water and the driver has gone to lie down behind the bushes, if you stand up on the front chest of the wagon, and look out, as far as your eye can reach, you will see over hills and dales, the bush stretching, silent, motionless, and hot. Not a sound is to be heard; your hand blisters on the tent of the wagon; suddenly a cicada from a clump of bush at your right sets up its keen, shrill cry; it is glorying in the heat and the solitude of the bush. You listen to it in the unbroken silence, till you and it seem to be alone in the world.

Not less characteristic is the bush, when, as a little child, you travel through it at night. The ox-wagon creaks slowly along the sandy road in the dark, the driver walks beside it and calls at intervals to his tired oxen; you look out across the wagon-chest, and, as the wagon moves along, the dark outlines of the bushes on either side seem to move too; now a great clump comes nearer and nearer like a vast animal; then, as you peer into the dark, they seem like great ruined castles coming to topple over you; and you creep closer down behind the wagon-chest. Against the dark night sky to the right, on the ridge of the hill, are the gaunt forms of aloes standing like a row of men keeping watch. You remembered all the stories you had heard of Kaffir wars and men shot down and stabbed, as they passed along hill-sides; and then a will-o'-the-wisp comes out from some dried-up torrent bed, and far before you dances in and out among the bushes, now in sight and now gone. You are not afraid; but you are glad when the people in the wagon begin to sing hymns; and more glad yet when at half-past nine it stops, drawn up beside a great clump of bush at the roadside. The tired oxen are taken from the yoke, and you climb out and light a fire and gather from afar and near stumps of dried elephant's food and euphorbia, and throw them on the fire, and the flame leaps up high. Then you all sit down beside the ruddy blaze; and away off the driver and leader have lighted their fire, and are talking to each other in Kaffir as they boil the coffee and roast the meat. The light from your own fire blazes up and lights the great, dusty body of the wagon, and the tired oxen, as they lie tied to their yokes, chewing the cud; and it glints on the bush with its dark-green leaves behind you, and on the faces round the fire; and you laugh, and talk; and forget the stories of Kaffir wars, and the great wild bush stretching about you.

This tract of coast belt forms part of the Eastern Province of the Cape Colony, and is under English rule. It is on the whole very fertile, though more subject to drought than the South-Western districts of the Colony; none of its rivers are perennial, all being in long droughts completely dry. Fruit and wool, and to a certain extent grain, are produced here. The villages, though far less beautiful than those of the west, show greater signs of commercial activity and civic life.

If we go further north along the coast we come to Kaffirland, a richly wooded, fertile tract; the scenery about the mouth of the St. John's River being supposed to be the finest combination of bush, river and mountain scenery to be found anywhere in South Africa. It is inhabited by Kaffir tribes of the Bantu race, in a half-civilized condition, and who are more or less under British protection.

Further north yet we come to Natal, a British colony. The climate here is warm, the country fertile in the extreme; coffee, sugar, rice, pineapples, and all tropical fruits abound here, yet the climate is not much less healthy than in the more southern portions of the coast belt. Its population is more largely black than white, the natives being Zulus of the Bantu race and imported coolies; the small white population is largely English, and appear to be rather above the common Colonial average in intelligence and culture.

Further north yet from Delagoa Bay to the mouth of the Zambesi stretches a tract of low lying but fertile and well-watered country; its streams, unlike most in South Africa, are more or less navigable. It is concerning this tract that the existing difference with Portugal has arisen. Though now fever-haunted along the beds of streams, civilized, drained and cultivated it might become one of the most fertile parts of South Africa. It is at present inhabited by native tribes and by Portuguese with their half-caste descendants; the number being inappreciable when compared to the native population. The Zambesi, which empties itself on the north, is the largest and only really great river of South Africa.

If we return to the Western districts of the Cape Colony, and leaving the coast belt, climb one of the high mountain ranges that here, as everywhere else, bound the coast belt separating it from the centre of the country, we shall find to our surprise that on reaching its summit, we make hardly any descent on the other side; and that what appeared from the south to be a high mountain range was merely the edge of a vast plateau. We shall find ourselves on an undulating plain, bounded on every side by small fantastic hills. The air is dry and clear; so light that we draw a long breath to make sure we are breathing it aright. The sky above is a more transparent blue than nearer the coast, and seems higher. There is not a blade of grass to be seen growing anywhere; the red sand is covered with bushes a few inches high, clothed with small, hard leaves of dull, olive-green; here and there is an ice-plant, or a stapelia with fleshy, cactus-like leaves, or a rod-like milk bush. As far as the eye can reach, there is often not a tree or a shrub more than two feet high; and far, in the distance, rising abruptly out of the plain, are perhaps two solitary flat-topped mountains; nearer at hand are small conical hillocks, made of round iron-stones piled so regularly on one another that they seem the work of man rather than nature. In the still, clear air you can see the rocks on a hill ten miles off as if they were beside you; the stillness is so intense that you can hear the heaving of your own breast. This is the Karoo. To the stranger, oppressive, weird, fantastic, it is to the man who has lived with it a scene for the loss of which no other on earth compensates.

As you travel through it after fifteen, twenty, or fifty miles, you may come upon a farm. The house, a small brown or white speck in the vast landscape, lies at the foot of a range of hills or a small "kopje," with its sheep kraals on the slope behind it, of large brown squares, enclosed by low stone walls. Sometimes there is a garden before the house also enclosed by stone walls, and containing fruit trees, and there is a dam with willow trees planted beside; sometimes there is no dam and no garden, and the little brown mud house stands there baking in the sun with its kraals behind it; the only water for men or beasts coming from some small unseen spring.

Throughout the Karoo there are few running streams; the waters of any fountains which may exist are quickly drunk up by the dry soil, and men and animals are largely dependent on artificial dams filled by rain-water. The farmer makes his livelihood from flocks of sheep which wander over the Karoo, and which in good years flourish on its short dry bushes.

In the spring, in those years when rain has fallen, for two months the Karoo is a flower garden. As far as the eye can reach, stretch blots of white and yellow and purple fig flowers;[6] every foot of Karoo sand is broken open by small flowering lilies and waxflowers; in a space a few feet square you may sometimes gather fifty kinds of flowers. In the crevices of the rocks little flowering plants are growing. At the end of two months it is over; the bulbs have died back into the ground by millions, the fig blossoms are withered, the Karoo assumes the red and brown tints which it wears for all the rest of the year.

Sometimes there is no spring. At intervals of a few years great droughts occur, when for thirteen months the sky is cloudless. The Karoo bushes drop their leaves and are dry withered stalks, the fountains fail, and the dams are floored with dry baked mud, which splits up into little squares; the sheep and goats die by hundreds, and the Karoo is a desert.

It is to provide for these long rainless periods that all plant-life in the Karoo is modified. Nothing that cannot retain some form of life habitually for six months, and at need for eighteen months, without rain, can subsist here. The Karoo bush, itself a tiny plant a few inches high, provides against droughts by roots of enormous length stretching under the ground to a depth of thirty feet. At the end of a ten months' drought, when the earth is baked into brickdust for two feet from the surface, if you break the dried stalk of a Karoo bush you will find running down its centre a tiny thread of pale-green tinted tissue still alive with sap.

Some plants maintain life by means of fleshy bulbs buried deep under ground, and in years when no rain falls they do not appear above the surface at all. Many plants have thick, fleshy leaves, in which they store up moisture against the time of need; some, such as the common sorrel and dandelion, become ice-plants; all over their fleshy leaves and stems are little diamond-like drops, which when broken are found to be full of pure water, a little plant sometimes having half a cupful stored in this way. Some have their leaves closely pressed together into little solid squares or balls, so saving all evaporation from their surfaces. Many are air plants; and, fastened by the slenderest roots to the ground or rocks, live almost entirely on the moisture they may draw from the air, and will grow and bloom for months or even years in a dwelling without either earth or water.

But the intense dryness modifies plant-life in another way; vegetation being scarce, all forms are eagerly sought after by animals; and an unusual number are protected by thorns, or by an intense bitterness, or by imitative adaption. One curious little plant protects itself by assuming the likeness of a hard white lichen that covers the rocks: its sharp-pointed green leaves are placed close together with their tips upwards, and on the tip of each leaf is a little white scaly sheath; the resemblance to the lichen growing on the rocks, besides which it is always found, is so great, that not till you tread on it, and your foot sinks in it, do you discover the deception.

Even on the insect life the exceptional conditions of the Karoo have a marked effect. Imitative colouring is more common here than elsewhere; thus, one insect is so like the white pebbles near which it is always found, that once dropped it cannot easily be again found; another large square insect with hardly any power of flight protects itself by lying motionless on red stones, which it so exactly resembles in colour, having even the rough cleavage marks upon it, that it is impossible to detect it, though you know it to be there; hardly any insect or reptile exists without imitative colouring.

To see the Karoo rightly one should saddle one's horse and ride away from some solitary farm-house. For twenty miles you may ride without seeing a living thing, nor passing even a herd of sheep or goats, or a korhaan or mierkat. At midday you off-saddle in a narrow plain between two low hills, that widen out at the further end into a wider plain, from which rise two conical, solitary, flat-topped hills; and the horizon is bounded by a purple mountain thirty miles off. You put your saddle down beside a milk bush and tie the halter round the horse's knee, that he may go and feed upon the bushes; and you seat yourself beside your saddle on the ground. The milk bush gives little shade, and the midday sun shines hot upon you. In the red sand at your feet the ants are running to and fro, carrying away the crumbs that may have fallen from your saddle-bag; and in the stillness you can hear your horse break the twigs from the bushes as he feeds; he moves further off, and you cannot hear even that. Then you notice on the red sand a little to the right, at the foot of a Karoo bush, a scaly lizard, with his head raised, and his belly palpitating on the red sand, watching you. He is a tiny fellow, three inches long. You move, and he is gone like a flash of light across the sand. By and by the ants have carried away the crumbs, and they too are gone. You sit alone with the sun beating down on you. As the plain lies to-day, so it has lain for long countless ages. Those sharp stones on the edge of the rise to your right, with their points turned to the sky, for how many centuries have they lain there, their edges as sharp and fresh to-day as though they had been broken but yesterday? Those motionless hills; the very knotted Karoo stem at your hand, for how many generations have the leaves sprouted and fallen from its gnarled stalk? The Bushman and the wild buck have crept over the scene; they have gone, and the Englishman with his horse and gun have come; but the plain lies with its sharp stones turned to the sky unchanged through the centuries. Those two stones standing loosely one upon another have stood so for thousands of years, because there was no hand to sever them.

It is not fear one feels, with that clear, blue sky above one; that which creeps over one is not dread. It was amid such scenes as these, amid such motionless, immeasurable silences, that the Oriental mind first framed its noblest conception of the unknown, the "I am that I am" of the Hebrew.

Nor less wonderful is the Karoo at night, when the Milky Way forms a white band across the sky; and you stand alone outside, and see the velvety, blue-black vault rising slowly on one side of the horizon and sinking on the other; and the silence is so intense you seem almost to hear the stars move. Nor is it less wonderful on moonlight nights, when you sit alone on a kopje; and the moon has arisen and the light is pouring over the plain; then even the stones are beautiful; and what you have believed of human love and fellowship—and never grasped—seems all possible to you.

And not less rare is the sunrise, when the hills, which have been purple in the dawn, turn suddenly to gold, and the rays of light shoot fifty miles across the plain and make every drop on the ice-plants sparkle.

Nor less wonderful are the sunsets, when you go out at evening after the day's work. The fierce heat is over; as you walk, a cool breath touches your cheek; you look up and all the hills are turned pink and purple, and a curious light lies on the top of the Karoo bushes; they are all gilded; then it vanishes, and along the horizon there are bars of gold and crimson against a pale emerald sky; and then everything begins to turn grey.

In the Karoo there are also mirages. As you travel along the great plains, such as those between Beaufort and De Aar, you continually see, in hot weather, far off on the horizon, lakes with the sunlight sparkling on the water; there are islands and palm trees and domes and minarets and snow-capped mountains. If you remain for half an hour they do not change. Why the mirage should always take the shape of lakes, islands, and palm trees, is something which science, in giving us its cause, has not accounted for.

There is much talk as to whether the Karoo could not be made more useful agriculturally by the building of great dams, and so be made to supply corn and vegetables in large quantities. This is irrelevant. When all the more readily cultivable places in the world and in South Africa have been brought under the plough, it may pay to turn the Karoo into a garden. The soil is scanty in most parts, sometimes barely covering the rocks. The long droughts, the habitual dryness of the air sucking up all moisture, and the sharp frosts in winter, must make agriculture always difficult, as it is now almost impossible. There are vast tracts covered with sharp stones where it is even difficult for sheep to find a mouthful of pasturage. But the Karoo has a future. It is a sanatorium of the world. It has a climate that is unequalled. It will be visited not only by those seeking recovery from illness, from the moister Zambesi and sub-tropical regions of Africa, but from all parts of the world. The selfish lover of the solitary Karoo may regret it, but the day will come when the inhabitants of the Karoo will cull millions from their dry soil and bare hills, as the inhabitants of the Riviera cull them to-day.

At present the Karoo is inhabited sparsely by Boer and English farmers, the homesteads lying often forty or fifty miles apart; and there are a few small villages, often at distances of more than a hundred miles, inhabited by the descendants of Boers and English.

The early inhabitants of the country were wandering tribes of Bushmen, whose paintings of animals we may still find under the shelving ledge of rocks, and whose arrow-heads of bone and flint may be still picked up at the sources of some spring they frequented. They are now gone, like the game which filled these plains sixty years ago; a few wandering remnants may be found in the extreme north-east, and a few ragged individuals in cast-off European clothing may be seen about the back doors of farm-houses. The whole of the Karoo now forms part of the Cape Colony.

If we leave the Karoo and go north and east, we find ourselves still on table-lands as high or higher, but the character has changed. The earth is more completely covered with soil, the hills are smaller and more rounded, the plains are softer, wider, more rolling, and grass has taken the place of the Karoo bush. At first, one who has lived long in the Karoo experiences a sense almost of relief at the changed nature of the scene; the soft, rolling outlines give one a sense of repose, and tension is relaxed; it is as when, long accustomed to live with some strongly marked individual nature, one comes for the first time into contact with one more negative and weak: for the first moment there is a sense of relief; then one wearies, and hungers again for the more positive and active.

The wide rolling grass plains, with their little hills, have their charm, but one tires of it. Throughout the Orange Free State, Griqualand West and Bechuanaland, with slight modifications, these grass plains extend; here they are more rolling, there more hilly; here dotted with a few beautiful mimosa trees, there level as a table; but there is always the same succession of level grassy plains, and generally of low, flat-topped hills, and ant-heaps. These plains are perhaps seen most typically in the west of the Free State. Here you may start in your wagon in the morning, and creep all day along the level earth, by a straight road, with the grasses on either hand; and in the evening when you stop, you will not yet have reached the low hill you saw before you on the horizon at starting. At great intervals you may come upon a farm, the white or brown mud-coloured house standing at the foot of a little hill, with its dam of rain-water and its garden and kraals, but you may travel in an ox-wagon more than a day without sighting one. In the spring the grass is short and green, in the autumn long and waving, and cattle flourish on it. It is still within memory of those who have not yet reached middle life when these plains were alive with game. Some of us can recall, as small children, travelling across them in the north of the Free State and Bechuanaland when the wagon seemed to divide herds of antelope and zebra with ostriches among them, the animals feeding on either side of the road within gunshot. Now they have been almost exterminated, and game is only to be found much further north.

The Free State is a small independent Republic, once under English rule, but rashly given up by England in 1854 as not worth keeping; it is inhabited by Boers and English, the Boers living mainly on the farms, the English in the towns. The labouring classes here, as elsewhere, are black.

British Bechuanaland, which comprises the larger part of this grass-plain region, is a tract as large as several European countries combined, inhabited mainly and sparsely by native tribes subject to England, by a few European settlers, and the inhabitants of a few embryo villages. Its soil is rich, and, like that of the rest of the grass plains, if vast dams were built, it might become a great grain-producing country. Its climate is perfect, rivalling that of the Karoo.

Griqualand West, one of the most interesting and varied divisions of the grass plains, is part of the Cape Colony. In it are situated the great Kimberley diamond-mines, the richest in the world. Within the space of a few miles lie those marvellous beds of once boiling but now petrified mud, which have for twenty years modified, and are still modifying, the history of South Africa.

It is through these grass plains that the Vaal and the Orange Rivers run; the last the most typical of South African rivers. In nothing perhaps is the difference between Europe and South Africa more emphasized than in their rivers. The South African in Europe hardly knows whether to admire or to scorn the smooth, gentle-flowing streams between their green banks. The South African river alternates between being a stupendous body of water, tearing with irresistible force to the sea between its high banks, or being merely a vast empty bed of dry sand with gigantic walls, the floor lined by boulders and débris, or with a silver line of water creeping through it, and a few large pools gathered here and there. Rising at an immense height above the sea in the central table-lands, fed by no melting snows, dependent entirely on the thunderstorms or the heavy rains of the wet seasons, the South African river rises with a rapidity and sweeps onward with a force that is almost inconceivable. A mighty body of red or dark-brown water, it rushes with a greasy, treacherous movement between its banks, the water being higher in the centre of the stream than at the sides and breaking here and there into bubbles and foam; on its dark surface it bears uprooted trees, drowned bodies of animals or men, the stupendous rapidity of its movement being only noticeable when you mark how a floating object now at your feet is out of sight round the bend of the river in a few seconds. Perhaps no object in inanimate nature conveys the same impression of conscious cruelty, and fierce, untamed strength, as a full African river.

Every year during the rainy season large numbers of persons are drowned in the full rivers; the numbers recorded in the papers during the last rainy season exceeded one hundred and fifty, and a large number of deaths of Kaffirs and others remains unchronicled. The nature of her rivers has powerfully affected the history of South Africa.

Crossing the Vaal River, we shall find to the north the Transvaal Republic. This is a tract of country of great extent and diversity. In part of it we have bush, in part high grass tablelands; on the east a low lying, moist, fever-haunted district. On the whole it is of great fertility. On the ridges of the high tablelands, lie the great Johannesburg gold-mines, which have drawn men from all parts of the earth. There are probably about eight black men to each white, the white population being probably divided between those of Boer, and English or other European extraction in the proportion of one to one; but no accurate census has yet been taken. The largest city, Johannesburg, is mainly English, the farming population Dutch-Huguenot.

If, leaving the Transvaal Republic, we cross the Limpopo, we shall find ourselves in the country known as Matabele and Mashonaland.

Bounded on the north by the Zambesi, the largest and only truly navigable river in South Africa, whose falls are the largest in the world, and further by Lake N'Gami and its low-lying territory, and on the West by the Kalahari, and on the east by the strip of low country claimed by Portugal. To the extreme left it is largely flat and arid, like the greater part of South Africa; the central position has mountain and bush, while along the low-lying river-beds it is fever-haunted, to the east is a high healthy tableland, well watered and wooded.

It is the land of Livingstone. Some of us remember on hot Sunday afternoons, as little children, when no more worldly book than missionary travels was allowed us, how we sat on our stools and looked out into the sunshine and dreamed of that land. Of the Garden Island, where the smoke of the mighty falls goes up, whose roar is heard twenty-five miles off; of hippopotami playing in the water, and of elephants and lions, and white rhinoceroses. We had heard of a man on the north of the Limpopo, who once saw three lions lying under the trees on the grass like calves, and he walked straight past them, and they looked at him and did nothing. We had heard of great ruins—ruins which lay there overgrown with weeds and trees. From there we believed the Queen of Sheba brought the peacocks and the gold for King Solomon. We meditated over it deeply. Yes, we should go and see it.[7] Up a valley, a great white rhinoceros would wade with its feet in the water; on each side under the trees zebras and antelopes would stand quietly feeding on the green grass. We would creep up quietly and look at them. No one but we would ever have seen them before. We would not disturb them. We would see the giraffes pick the top leaves from the trees, and elephant-cows walk along with their little calves at their sides. At night round the fire we would hear the lions roar, and the wild dogs howl, and sleep with our feet to the fire, and the stars above us; we would plant seeds on the Garden Island; we would pass lions and they should not eat us; we would climb over the ruins where the Queen of Sheba stood! We almost dropped the book from our knees and rose to go. In that land there were no Sunday afternoons and no boredom; you could do as you liked. The very names Zambesi and Limpopo drew us, with the lure of the unknown.

Even to-day there is still much to be learnt with regard to these lands. To the west it is inhabited by the Bamangwato, under their chief Kame; in the centre by the brave warlike Matabele, under the chief Lobengula; in the east by the mild, industrious Mashonas, on whom the Matabele raid; and there are to-day the men of the British South Africa Company looking for gold.

It is more than possible that if we went there now we should not find all we have dreamed of. Elephants are scarce; Selous says he has killed the last white rhinoceros; if we met a lion he might eat us; the hippopotami will soon be driven away from the Victoria Falls; the ruins may not be three thousand years old; boredom and Sunday afternoons may exist there as elsewhere, and the gold may need much washing from the sand; but it is certain that in these auriferous regions will ultimately spring up dense populations. It is from the territories north of the Vaal and south of the Zambesi, in this moister climate, with its more navigable rivers, that civilization in its coarser proportions will first unroll itself. More Southern Africa may produce better men; our greatest poet may yet be born in the Karoo; our great artist in the valley of the Paarl; our great thinker among the keen airs of Basutoland; neither wealth nor dense population have a tendency to produce the finest individuals; but it is in the north-east of Southern Africa that mineral wealth and vast populations with all that they signify for good and evil will probably first arise.

To understand the view taken in South Africa of the opening up of these lands, it is necessary to turn back from the present day to the Europe of the sixteenth century, when the hearts and eyes of men were turned to the new world, and each man who crossed the seas carried with him the hearts and thoughts of the thousands who remained. There is no explanation to be given of these sudden movements of entire peoples in a given direction. Their scientific causes are as subtle as those which govern the migrations of the lemmings. Some lead and the rest follow.

If we leave these territories we shall find to the south-east a territory known as the Kalahari Desert; a vast tract where little rain falls and springs are rare, and there are no running streams; but it is less accurately called a desert than many parts of South Africa that are never so called. There are trees and low shrubs in many places; such antelopes as can exist without much water are found, and a few wandering natives, who know by long experience where water may be had, by sucking through the sand. In forty years there will probably be a railway across it; now it is practically uninhabited.

West of the Kalahari and bordering the Atlantic, up and down the coast runs a vast territory rich in copper and other metals, but in parts drier than the Kalahari itself. Instead of karoo it is covered over a large extent by a coarse, thick tuft grass, which has the curious power of resisting drought for two or even three years; it still stands upright and affords food for the cattle and wild antelopes. Such wandering Bushman and Hottentot tribes as still exist are found mainly in this part, and, except a few missionaries and traders, the country is not inhabited largely by white men.

To the east of the Free State lies Basutoland, the Switzerland of South Africa, rich in its mountains and with a climate of superb quality. Here is to be found the Basuto nation, a people whose history since their foundation under their valiant chieftainess Ma' Katees is probably more epic than that of any other people in South Africa, save that of the old fore-trekkers who founded the Transvaal Republic.

Again, north of Natal lie Zululand and the adjoining native territories where the virile Bantu tribe of Zulus, along with other Bantu peoples, may be found inhabiting an almost tropical and luxuriantly fertile country: while further north and east yet along the coast stretch the Portuguese territories, the remnants of Portugal's once large empire, naturally rich and productive, but in many parts low-lying and fever-smitten.

This, then, is South Africa; the country which the South African regards as his native land. To the superficial observer nothing would be more unlike than its differing parts; between the falls of the Zambesi with their spray-drenched forest and their banks, unchanged by civilization as when the eye of Livingstone first beheld them more than thirty years ago, and a little Eastern Province town, with its narrow, conventional life; between the wilds of Namaqualand, where the little Bushman still sits down behind his bush to cook his supper of animal entrails and lies down with the stars over him, and the white house and tree-lined streets of the Paarl; between the Kalahari, where under a thorn tree groups of antelopes are gathered in the moonlight, and the gambling saloons and music-halls of Johannesburg and Kimberley; between the kraals of Kaffirland, where the Kaffir boys are holding their "abakweta" dances in the moonlight with whitened faces, and the drawing-rooms of Cape Town, where women in low dresses sit aimlessly talking, there seems little in common.

Nevertheless, through the whole of South Africa there runs a certain unity. It is not only that geraniums and plumbago, flat-topped mountains, aloes and euphorbia are peculiar to our land, and that sand and rocks abound everywhere; nor is it even that the land is everywhere young, and full of promise; but there is a certain colossal plenitude, a certain large freedom in all its natural proportions, which is truly characteristic of South Africa. If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.

Many years ago, we travelled from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown in a post-cart with a woman who had just come from England. All day we had travelled up through the bush, and at noon came out on a height where, before us, as far as the eye could reach, over hill and dale, without sign of human habitation or break, stretched the bush. She began to sob; and, in reply to our questionings, could only reply, almost inarticulately: "Oh! It's so terrible! There's so much of it! There's so much!"

It is this "so much" for which the South African yearns when he leaves his native land. The lane, the pond, the cottage with roses climbing over the porch, the old woman going down the lane in her red cloak driving her cow, the parks with the boards of warning, the hill with the church and ruin beyond, oppress and suffocate us. Amid the arts of Florence and Venice, the civilizations of London and Paris, in crowded drawing-rooms, surrounded by all that wealth, culture and human fellowship can give, there comes back to us the remembrance of still Karoo nights, when we stood alone under the stars, and of wide breezy plains, where we rode; and we return. Europe cannot satisfy us.

The sharp business man who makes money at the "Fields" and goes to end his life in Europe, comes back at the end of two years. You ask him why he returned. He looks at you in a curious way, and, with his head aside, replies meditatively: "There's no room there, you know. It's so free here." Neither can you entrap him into further explanations; South Africa is like a great fascinating woman; those who see her for the first time wonder at the power she exercises, and those who come close to her fall under it and never leave her for anything smaller, because she liberates them.

If we turn from the land itself, to examine more closely the people who inhabit it, we shall be struck in the first place by the marvellous diversity of races found among us.

For not only are the South Africans not of one national variety (a fact not surprising when the extent of our country is taken into consideration); not only do we belong to the most distinct branches of the human family to be found anywhere on the surface of the globe, representing the most widely different stages in human development, from the Bushman with his ape-like body, flat forehead and primitive domestic institutions, to the nineteenth-century Englishman fresh from Oxford, with the latest views on social and political development, and the financial Jew; but we are more or less a mixture of these astonishingly diverse types. We are not a collection of small, and, though closely contiguous, yet distinct peoples; we are a more or less homogeneous blend of heterogeneous social particles in different stages of development and of cohesion with one another, underlying and overlaying each other like the varying strata of confused geological formations.

It is this fact which lies at the core of the social and political problem of South Africa, and which makes it at the same time the most complex and difficult, and the most interesting, with which a people has ever been called upon to deal.

To grasp our unique condition clearly, it will be well to take a blank map of South Africa, and pass over it, from east to west, from north to south, from the Zambesi to Cape Town, from Walfish Bay to Kaffirland, a coating of dark paint, lighter in the west, to represent the yellow-tinted Bushmen and Hottentots, and half-caste races; and darker, mounting up to the deepest black, in the extreme east, to represent vast numbers of the black-skinned Bantus. From no part of the map, so large that a pin's point might be set down there, will this layer of paint representing the aboriginal native races be absent; darker here and lighter there, it will always be present. If we now wish to represent the earliest European element, the Boer or Dutch Huguenots, we shall have to pass over the whole map lines and blots of blue paint, more plentiful in some parts, rarer in others, but nowhere entirely absent. And if again we wish to represent the English and modern continental element we shall have to pass over the entire map, from the Zambesi to Cape Agulhas, a fine layer of red paint, thinner in spots and thicker in others, but never wholly absent. If we now add a few insignificant dots on the extreme east coast, to represent the Portuguese, our racial map of South Africa will be complete.

Looking at it, the first thing which must strike us is the fact that no possible line which can be drawn across it will separate the colours one from another, or even combine their darker shades. There is a dark patch of red to the north of our map, but there are others equally dark in the south; the blue colour is prevalent at the north end, but also in the east; the dark tone is everywhere visible; the colours are intermingled everywhere, like the tints in a well-shot Turkey carpet. They cannot be separated.

But should we wish to make our map truly representative of the complexities of the South African problem, it will be necessary to go further, and across this intermingled mass of colours to draw at intervals, at all angles, and in all directions, lines of ink, which shall cut up the surfaces into squares and spaces of different sizes. If these lines be truly drawn they will be found to bear no relation to the proportions of the colours beneath them; they will run straight through masses of colour, cutting them into parts; and except in the case of some of the smallest divisions, where the dark predominates, it will be impossible to trace the slightest connection between the lines and the colouring.

Our political as well as our racial map of South Africa will now be complete; for these lines represent the boundaries of the political states into which South Africa is subdivided. For (and this is a matter which requires our carefullest consideration) not only is South Africa peopled everywhere by a mixture of races overlying and underlying each other in confused layers; but these mixtures of peoples are redivided into political states whose boundaries, except in the case of a few of the necessarily ephemeral native states, have no relation to the racial divisions of the people beneath them, but are purely the result of more or less political combination and therefore have in them, at core, nothing of the true nature of national divisions.

This matter lies so deeply at the heart of the South African, and has so much to do with our complicated problem, that it will be well to look at it more closely.

A nation, like an individual, is a combination of units; in the nation the units are persons; in the individual body they are cells. The single cell, alone and uncombined, is capable only of the simplest forms of development; the solitary amœboid germ can undergo no high development, as it floats unconnected in the water or air; it is only when cells are combined in close and vital union with others, and there is interaction, that high development is possible. The highly differentiated complex cells that go to form a human eye or brain are possible only as parts of a larger interacting organism, a long-continued and close interaction between millions of cells, and could come into being in no other way.

Yet more is the analogous fact true with regard to human beings. Alone and divided from his fellows, the individual man is capable of only the very lowest form of development. The accounts of persons who have been lost in infancy and grown up alone, apart from any organization or interaction with their fellows, shows in the extremest form how very low is the natural condition of the human amœboid. Speechless, knowledgeless, its very hands incapable of performing the simplest operation which the veriest child in the lowest organized society learns to perform (as we imagine intuitively), such an individuality impresses on us, in its extremest form, a lesson which all human history teaches us in other shapes.

Great men, great actions, great arts, great developments, are impossible without those closely united, interacting organic combinations of men which we call nations, using that word in its largest sense, and to include all organized, centralized, interacting masses of humans and to exclude such as are inorganic and only united in name or by force. The organically united nation is the only known matrix in which the human being can attain to full development. A Plato, an Aristotle, a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo, implying as much the existence of a Greece, an England, or an Italy, are as impossible without them as an eye or brain imply and would be impossible without a whole human organism. They are the efflorescence of the nations.

Without the closely united, interacting, organically bound body of humans, no great men, no highly developed masses.

Therefore, in all ages, and rightly, men have set the highest value on the maintenance of their social organization, and have regarded as a greater evil than any which could afflict them personally the destruction of their organism as a whole. The individual particles may be left untouched (as in the case of Poland), but they suffer more deeply from the loss of interaction and organized union than had they separately been individually destroyed.

Nor is it only the particles composing a national organism that gain by its maintenance in health and unity. From a wider standpoint it is of importance to humanity as a whole. The virile organized individuality of Greece, of Rome, of England (while it remained an organized unity and had not begun to dissolve itself into an inchoate trading firm, seeking to dominate by force peoples and lands in all parts of the world for trade purposes), and of France has bequeathed almost as much to humanity at large as to its own members; and an old, diseased or disorganized nationality, or a young, shapeless, unorganized mass of humans, however healthy the individual units composing it may be, is a mass without the capability of full development or of adding to the common fund of humanity.

The first need of an unorganized mass of humans is to attain to some form of vital organization. This must precede the fullest development of the individual units, and must adjust itself before any complex internal growth can begin.

Painfully trite as these observations are, it is necessary to keep them in mind when dealing with the South African question.

Were the political states into which South Africa is to-day divided—not highly organized and developed nations, bound together by bonds of race, language, religion and long-continued interaction into organic wholes, for that is impossible—but, did they possess, however sporadically and embryonically, the germs from which national life and unity might develop itself, if without the union of race, language and ideas which goes to form the ideally united people, there were at least this one condition, from which national life and unity might be expected to develop itself: that, divided from each other as the inhabitants of each of one state might be in race, religion, language and interest, they were yet more nearly united to the majority of their fellows within their state on these matters, than with large masses of the peoples immediately beyond their borders—if this were so, then the problem of South Africa would not only not be what it is; it would be reversed. Our problem would then be: How can each separate state into which South Africa is divided be maintained in its integrity and so strengthened that it may most quickly attain to full national unity and organization? For so would the benefit of national life be most quickly and simply attained by the peoples of South Africa.

Geographical size has nothing to do with the perfection or value of a nation. Greece in her palmiest days, Rome at the height of her power, were not larger than small South African states; an ant or a bird are not less valuable or highly organized than an elephant or a hippopotamus. Small countries such as Greece or Holland, or Switzerland or England in the days of her greatness, have contributed as much to the common fund of humanity as the largest countries; indeed, in the past, when the means of communication were less perfected than at present, a very minute geographical extent seemed essential to the health and vitality of a nation; and if the converse seems to hold at the present day, there is yet no reason why, in a country of such vast extent as South Africa, half a dozen great, independent nations should not co-exist. The Cape Colony or Transvaal are larger than France; there is no a priori reason, if our political states possessed the least germ of organic unity or nationality, why the ultimate form of organization in South Africa should not be that of half a dozen distinct nations. The question is:

Does such a germ exist?

We believe the most temporary survey will prove that it does not.

Short as is the time at our disposal, let us rapidly glance at a few of our states to see if any germ of national life lies at their core.

Let us take first the Cape Colony, as the oldest, best organized, most important, and most powerful of our divisions; one whose boundaries, except at the north-east, are tolerably well defined, and which has a centralized form of political government. There are in the Colony, roughly speaking, a million and a half of men.

One million of these are natives, Hottentots, and half-castes, but mainly Bantus, of the Chuana or Kaffir races; the remaining half million are divided between men of English and other European descent speaking English, and the men of Boer descent, often speaking the "Taal." Now not only are these peoples who form our population not united to each other by race, language, creed or custom but, and this is a far more important fact, each division forming our population is far more closely connected by all these ties to masses of humans beyond our borders than to their fellow Cape Colonists within. Thus, our Bantus and Chuanas are absolutely one in race, language and sympathy with countless of thousands of Kaffirs and Chuanas of Kaffirland, Basutoland, the Free State, and even Transvaal. They are far more closely bound to these fellows of theirs in other states than to the white men in their own. The same may be said of the white population. Not only are they not bound to the native population in their state, but the Cape Colonial Englishman is absolutely identical with those in the Transvaal, Zambesia, Free State and Natal; and the Boer of the Cape Colony is absolutely identical with the Boers of these different states; he is only artificially divided by a political line from his friends and kinsfolk in the Transvaal, Free State or Natal. Race, language, creed, tradition, which in the true national state form centripetal forces, binding its parts to one centre, in such a state become centrifugal, driving them from it; and the political boundaries are so crossed and recrossed by these lines of union that they are rendered void.

Let us look at the Transvaal. We have here a great state. Its vast native population is absolutely identical with those immediately beyond its borders; and its small white population is far more deeply tied to its fellow race, men beyond its boundaries, than to blacks or even to white fellow Transvaalers. Its largest and most powerful city, Johannesburg, is the most truly cosmopolitan city in South Africa. It is called the Boer Republic, but if the Boer or Dutch Huguenot element is to be sought for in its highest perfection, it must be looked for not in the Transvaal towns, but in the beautiful villages of the Paarl and Stellenbosch, in the old Cape Colony. The lines which divide the newly arrived European of Johannesburg from the newly arrived European of Kimberley, Cape Town and Durban, and the Boer of the Transvaal from the Boer of the Paarl, are necessarily fictions in any but the most superficial sense.

All that has been said holds yet more in the Free State. We have here a small republic whose population is absolutely one with the populations on all sides of it. The Basuto of the Free State is divided by absolutely nothing but a political line, the result of a political agreement, from the Basuto of Basutoland. The Boer farmer is absolutely one with the Boer of the Colony on the one hand and the Transvaal on the other; the Englishman of the towns are the Englishmen of the Colony and the Transvaal. Between the towns of Beaufort West, Harrismith and Pretoria there is no difference, except that the last is a little more English than the first.

All that has been said holds also of Natal. The vast native population is one with that in the native states beyond its boundaries; its Englishmen are as little divided by any racial, religious or social difference from their brothers, cousins and friends in the Cape Colony, Zambesia and the Transvaal as if they were still living in neighbouring European streets.

Certain there are of the small native states under British or other protection, which have a semblance of national unity. In Basutoland, Pondoland, and Matabeleland a more or less homogeneous race does inhabit a given area; but these states are exactly those which cannot possibly survive in contact with civilization. Apart entirely from any nefarious desires or actions on the part of civilized men, there are a few mechanical inventions, and a few intellectual conceptions inherent to civilization, which, coming in contact with any savage state, must inevitably send it into solution; a savage organization can no more stand in a stream of civilization than a polyp can remain in a current of corrosive fluid without dissolving into water. But, it might be suggested, if our political state boundaries are not national in the true sense of the word, they may at least represent the lines of united commercial interests, lines which, in such a civilization as ours, might be almost strong enough to found a quasi-national unity on! But even this is not so. Commercial interests we have, but they are not conterminous with our political boundaries. The Eastern and Western Provinces of the Cape Colony have far more cause for commercial jealousy and antagonism that have either with the Free State, the development and increased wealth of which benefits both. Natal is as deeply interested in the wealth and development of the Transvaal as if it were a department of her own.

Commercial interests we have, and they are strong; but they are not conterminous with our state boundaries, and do not strengthen them.

Viewed thus, we see that the States of South Africa are not, taken isolatedly, national; their boundaries are of the nature of electoral, cantonal, fiscal, political divisions; of immense importance, and by all means to be preserved, as such divisions are, but not to be mistaken for those deeper, subtler and organic divisions from which the life of great nations takes its rise. There is far more resemblance between the population of the Transvaal and that of the Colony, Free State, or Natal, than between the populations of Yorkshire and Surrey; there is far more subtle, deep-lying, organic difference between Normandy and Bordeaux than between Natal and the Cape Colony. In looking at the political divisions of South Africa, one is irresistibly reminded of a well-known English village, in which the boys on the one side of the street threw stones at the boys on the other, because the parish boundary ran down the centre. Great nations are not founded on such differences as these.

But, it might be yet asked: "If our peoples are so mingled that our states cannot become the foundation of healthy national life, would it not be possible in so large and sparsely peopled a country to redivide our races, giving to each its territory?" Apart from the physical impossibilities which render such a proposal ridiculous, if, by some almighty force, all our natives could be gathered into one territory, our Boers in another, and our Englishmen into a third, no sooner would that force be removed than we should remingle in the old manner, the native as labourer craving the products of our civilization, the Boer as farmer, and the Englishman, Jews and other newcomers as speculators and builders of railroads, and introducers of commerce. A natural want binds and blends our races. But there is a subtler reason why such racial divisions are not even thinkable. The blending has now gone too far. There is hardly a civilized roof in South Africa that covers people of only one nation; in our households, in our families, in our very persons we are mingled.

Let us take a typical Cape household before us at the moment. The father of the household is an Englishman; the mother a so-called Boer, of half Dutch and half French blood, with a French name; the children are of the three nationalities; the governess is a German; the cook is a Half-caste, partly Boer and partly the descendant of the old slaves; the housemaid is a Half-caste, partly Hottentot, and whose father was perhaps an English soldier; the little nurse girl is a pure Hottentot; the boy who cleans the boots and waits, a Kaffir; and the groom is a Basuto. This household is a type of thousands of others to be found everywhere in South Africa.

If a crude and homely illustration may be allowed, the peoples of South Africa resemble the constituents of a plum-pudding when in the process of being mixed; the plums, the peel, the currants, the flour, the eggs, and the water are mingled together. Here plums may predominate, there the peel; one part may be slightly thinner than another, but it is useless to try to resort them; they have permeated each other's substance: they cannot be reseparated; to cut off a part would not be to resort them; it would be dividing a complex but homogeneous substance into parts which would repeat its complexity.

What then shall be said of the South African problem as a whole? Is it impossible for the South African peoples to attain to any form of unity, organization, and national life? Must we for ever remain a vast, inchoate, invertebrate mass of humans, divided horizontally into layers of race, mutually antagonistic, and vertically severed by lines of political state division, which cut up our races without simplifying our problems, and which add to the bitterness of race conflict the irritation of political division? Is national life and organization unattainable by us?

We believe that no one can impartially study the condition of South Africa and feel that it is so. Impossible as it is that our isolated states should consolidate, and attain to a complete national life, there is a form of organic union which is possible to us. For there is a sense in which all South Africans are one. It is not only that all men born in South Africa, from the Zambesi to the Cape, are bound by the associations of their early years to the same vast, untamed nature; it is not only that South Africa itself, situated at the extremity of the continent, shut off by vast seas and impassable forests from the rest of the world, forces upon its inhabitants a certain union, like that of a crew who, in the same ship, set out on an interminable voyage together; there is a subtle but a very real bond, which unites all South Africans, and differentiates us from all other peoples in the world. This bond is our mixture of races itself. It is this which divides South Africans from all other peoples in the world, and makes us one. From Zambesi to the sea the same mixture exists, in slightly varying form, and the same problem is found. Wherever a Dutchman, an Englishman, a Jew, and a native are superimposed, there is that common South African condition through which no dividing line can be drawn. The only form of organization which can be healthily or naturally assumed by us is one which takes cognizance of this universal condition. Great and seemingly insuperable as are for the moment the difficulties which lie in our path on the way to a great, common, national unity, no man can study South Africa without feeling that, in this form, and this alone, is national life and organization attainable by South Africa. Difficult as it may be, it is at once simpler and easier than the consolidation of any separate part. It is the one form of crystallization open to us, the one shape we shall assume.

South African unity is not the dream of the visionary; it is not even the forecast of genius, which makes clear and at hand that which only after ages can accomplish: it is not even like the splendid vision of that little-understood man, the first Napoleon, of a unified and consolidated Europe, which was fated to failure from the moment of its inception, because dreamed five hundred years before its time. South African unity is a condition the practical necessity for which is daily and hourly forced upon us by the common needs of life: it is the one possible condition which will enable us to solve our internal difficulties: it is the one path open to us. For this unity all great men born in South Africa during the next century will be compelled directly or indirectly to labour; it is this unity which must precede the production of anything great and beautiful by our people as a whole; neither art, nor science, nor literature, nor statecraft will flourish among us as long as we remain in our unorganized form: it is the attainment of this unity which constitutes the problem of South Africa: How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a great, a healthy, a united, an organized nation be formed?

If our view be right, the problem which South Africa has before it to-day is this: How, from our political states and our discordant races, can a great, healthy, united, organized nation be formed?

This problem naturally divides itself into two parts. For the moment, the first is the most pressing and absorbing, that of the political union of our states; and it must precede the other. Great as are the difficulties which lie in this path at present, difficulties whose extent can only be understood by one who has deeply studied our internal condition, yet so urgent is the practical need for it, so ripe the time, that there are probably men now living who may see it accomplished. It is impossible to study the South Africa of to-day and doubt that within sixty years there will exist here a great centralized and independent form of government embodying the united political will of the people; that with regard to external defence and the most vital internal problems, South Africa will be politically one; its state divisions, while developed and intensified in certain directions, will be relegated to the performance of those invaluable functions of self-government for which they are so admirably fitted. Circumstances and individuals favouring, we may see this accomplished before the next decade is out; it must come at last.

For the moment, the political aspect of our problem is the most pressing; but there is another, deeper and more important, and of which no man now living will see the final solution. A central government, a customs union, a common treasury for purposes of external defence, these are but the shell in which the vital unity of the community must be contained if we are ever to become, not simply a large, but a great, a powerful and a truly progressive people. Day by day, and hour by hour, every man and woman in South Africa, whether they will it or no, labours to produce the final answer which will be given to this question: How, of our divided peoples, can a great, healthy, harmonious and desirable nation be formed?

This is the final problem of South Africa. If we cannot solve it, our fate is sealed. If South Africa is unable so to co-ordinate, and, where she cannot blend, so to harmonize her differing peoples, that if in years to come a foreign foe should land upon her shores, and but six men were left to defend her, two English, two Dutch, two of native extraction: if those six men would not stand shoulder to shoulder, fighting for a land that was their own, in which each felt, widely as he might otherwise be separated from his fellows, that he had a stake,—then the fate of South Africa is sealed; the handwriting has already appeared on the wall against us; we must take for ever a last place among the nations; however large, rich, populous we may become, we shall never be able to look free, united peoples in the face. In past ages empires have existed which were founded on racial hatred and force. Of this type were the great states of antiquity—Egypt, Assyria, Rome, and Greece. They passed away; but for a time they were able to maintain themselves against states of like construction with themselves, only falling when they came into contact with freer and more united peoples.

In the twentieth century it will not be possible for a state constructed after the plan of the ancient world to attain to power and developed greatness, even for a time. In an age in which the nations of the civilized world are with titanic efforts shaping rafts with which to shoot those rapids down which empire after empire, civilization after civilization, have disappeared, and will shoot them and appear below them, free united peoples; if the South Africa of the future is to remain eaten internally by race hatreds, a film of culture and intelligence spread over seething masses of ignorance and brutality, inter-support and union being wholly lacking; then, though it may be our misfortune rather than our fault, our doom is sealed; our place will be wanting among the great, free nations of earth. Neither in art, in science, in material invention, in the discovery of larger and more satisfactory modes of conducting human life, can we stand beside them. A man with an internal disease feeding on his vitals cannot compete with the sound in body and limb.

Taken as a whole, so vast, so complex, and so beset with difficulty is our South African problem, that it may be truly said that no European nation has had during the last eight hundred years to face anything approaching it in complexity and difficulty. To find any analogy to it we must go back as far as the England of Alfred, when divided Saxons and invading Danes were the elements out of which organic unity had to be constructed. But there are elements in our problem which no European nation has ever had to face, and which no migrating part of a European race has ever had to deal with, in exactly the same form in which they meet us. Our race question is complicated by a question of colour, which presents itself to us in a form more virulent and intense than that in which it has met any modern people. America and India have nothing analogous to it; and it has to be faced in an age which does not allow of the old methods in dealing with alien and so-called inferior peoples. In South Africa the nineteenth century is brought face to face with a prehistoric world.

To understand rightly the difficulty of our problem; to grasp the nature of the obstacles which lie in our path to organic union; to understand our crying need of it, and to grasp the grounds we have for hope, it will be necessary to examine closely the different races of which we are composed; and finally, to glance briefly at some of the conditions and individuals that are at the present moment largely influencing the future of South Africa.

CHAPTER II[8]
THE BOER

... And that one of these days that golden place

Shall be reached by the Lemmings yet!...

E. A.

As in describing the physical features of South Africa, we lingered longest over the Karoo, not because it was one of the largest or most important features in the country, but because it was the most characteristically South African; so in describing its people, we shall dwell first and at greatest length on the South African Boer—not because he is the most important nor the most powerful element among our peoples, but because he is the most typically South African. The Bantu and the Englishman may be found elsewhere on the earth's surface in equal or greater perfection; but the Boer, like our plumbagos, our silver-trees, and our kudoos, is peculiar to South Africa. He is the result of an intermingling of races, acted on during two centuries by a peculiar combination of circumstances, and a result has been produced so unique as only to be decipherable through long and sympathetic study.

Our limits will not allow of our entering into an analysis of all those conditions of his early history which have made the Boer what he is to-day. The bare facts are ably and concisely set forth in works readily accessible to all[9]; but the great epic of South Africa which lies beneath them, yet awaits its seer and singer.

For our purpose, it is possible only to note shortly a few of those points in the early conditions of the Boer which bear most strongly on his later development, which have shaped his peculiarities, and made him what he is.

The history of the Boer begins, as is well known, in 1652, when Van Riebeek landed at the Cape with his small handful of soldiers and sailors to found a victualling station under the shades of Table Mountain, for the ships of the Dutch East India Company as they sailed to and from the East Indies.

If one climbs alone on a winter's afternoon to the old Block House on the spur of the Devil's Peak at Cape Town, and lies down on the ruined stone bastion, with the warm sun shining on one's back—as one lies there dreaming; the town and shipping in the bay below, blotted out in a haze of yellow light, leaving only the great curve of the sands on the Blue-Berg Strand, and the far-off mountains that peer out and disappear into the blue; then the noisy little life of the valley slips away from one, and through the mist of two centuries one is almost able to put out one's hand and touch the old, long-buried days, when the first white men built their huts on the shores of Table Bay; when at night the leopards crept down from the mountain and took lambs from the kraals, and lions were shot before the hut-doors; when the Blue-Berg Strand was trodden by elephants, and the Hottentots lit their watch fires on the banks of the Liesbeck; when the great Hout-Bay valley was flecked with antelopes; and the stream which comes down now from the mountain gorge and flows through the valley muddy and dark, was clear and crystal, and widened out into pools where the hippopotami played, and then crept away into the sea through the white sand;—days when the blue mountains were the limit of the world the white men knew, and shut out the mysterious unknown beyond. Basking alone there on one's face in the warm sunshine, so near do those old days seem, that one half expects the lammervanger[10] to spread out its wings and sail out from the cliffs above, and a bush-buck's step to break the stillness in the brushwood; and one is loath to shake one's self and go down into the hot, fretted life of the little city below; where the shop windows glitter with the work of many lands, and where women with little waists and high shoes trip down the pavement; and the Parliament Houses, with their red brick and stucco, stare at one, and on the stoep of the Club in Church Square tall-hatted men lounge and talk over the latest town gossip or retire to the bar for whisky; and where in the side streets are broken pavements, and Malays, and Half-castes, and fish-carts with their shrill whistles; and in the docks coal-dust and shipping, and convicts and sailors; and everywhere are canteens and brothels and churches—all that makes the life of a civilized modern town. It is hard to climb down through the fir-woods and go back to it.[11]

So when one sits to write of African men and things, one would like to linger long over those early days, every detail of which is precious to us now; even how Annitje de Boeren was allowed to sell milk and butter to the early men of the colony; how the handful of folks planted gardens, and traded with the Hottentots for sheep, and made expeditions into the unknown lands of Stellenbosch and Paarl. All the story of how the sapling of white man's life in South Africa first struck its roots into the soil has an interest no story of later growth can hold for us. But for the present we can only notice hurriedly, and in passing, a few of those facts in the condition of the early settlers which seem most to have made the African Boer that which we to-day find him.

The first fact we have to note is that the men Van Riebeek brought with him to found his little settlement were men of different nationalities; largely Frisian or Dutch, but also German, Swedish, and even English. They were also, almost to a man, soldiers and sailors, children of fortune, and not agricultural labourers. A century later, when we find the descendants of these men wanderers across the untrodden plains of South Africa, their flint-locks as their only guard, the motive that drives them forward and on only an unquenchable passion for movement and change, and a fierce rebellion against the limitations with which civilized life hedges about and crushes the life of the individual—then we shall find it useful to remember that in part the original stock from which these men sprang was composed of these free-fighting children of fortune, rovers of the sea and the sword. That power of persistent, patient, physical labour and submission to restraint, that tenacious clinging to one spot of earth on which he has once taken root, which constitutes at once the strength and the weakness of the true agricultural classes in all countries, has always been markedly absent from the character of our South African Boer, and could hardly have been his through inheritance. For Van Riebeek's men were not merely soldiers and sailors forced into service by conscription, but men gathered from all nations by a species of natural selection, their inborn love of a wild and roving life leading them into the service of the Dutch East India Company. Over the shoulders of the men who took their aim at Majuba Hill, and behind the men and women who again and again, on their long and terrible marches through South African deserts, have seen their kindred fall dead at their feet of thirst and want, and have yet moved on, one sees the faces of these old rough forebears looking! The South African Boer becomes fully intelligible only when we remember that the blood of those men runs in him, modified truly and powerfully by other elements, but active in him still.

We come now to a second small point, to be noted as bearing on the development of the Boer.

The commanders of the early settlement gave out to certain of their men portions of land on the peninsula, to be cultivated for their own and the Company's benefit. These men built huts, planted and sowed. Thirty years after Van Riebeek landed there were two hundred and ninety-three white men in the settlement, but only eighty-eight white women, and the men on their little allotments grumbled for want of wives. The directors of the Dutch East India Company conferred, and it was determined to send out from certain orphan asylums in Holland respectable girls to supply this want; and from time to time, ships brought small numbers. The soldiers and the sailors at the Cape welcomed them gladly; they were all speedily married and settled in their homes at the foot of Table Mountain.

It may appear fanciful, but we believe it is not so, to suppose that this small incident throws a sidelight on one of the leading characteristics of the African Boer. For the South African Boer differs from every other emigrant branch of a European people whom we can recall, either in classical or modern times, in this: that having settled in a new land, and not having mixed with the aboriginal inhabitants, nor accepted their language, he has yet severed every intellectual and emotional tie between himself and the parent lands from which he sprang. The Greek, whether he settled in Asia Minor or Sicily, though economically and politically independent, was still a Greek; an uncut cord of intellectual and emotional sympathy still bound him to the mother country; and after two hundred years the inhabitant of Syracuse or Ephesus was still a Greek of the Greeks; bound not only to Greece as a whole, but to that particular state from which he sprang; among the most immortal and typical of Grecian names are those of men not born in the parent home of the race, but in its colonies. The modern Australian, Canadian, Yankee, or even American Spaniard, if of unmixed European blood, turns still to Europe as Home. Political differences may have had to be settled in blood, and commercial interests may divide, but, emotionally and intellectually, the bond which binds a European colonist to the home from which he sprang, and to Europe as a whole, is an operative fact. The Boer has had no great conflict with his parent peoples in Europe; he has not lost his race by mingling it with the barbarous people among whom he settled; yet he is as much severed from the lands of his ancestors and from Europe, as though three thousand instead of two hundred years had elapsed since he left it.

Later on we shall look at certain large and adequate reasons for this remarkable phenomenon; but among the lesser causes which have contributed to it, it seems to us more than probable that the position of these early mothers of the race may have played its small part.

When the ordinary emigrant female bids farewell to Europe to make her home in the new land, whether she leaves a mud cabin in Ireland, a vine-grower's cottage in Germany, or a mansion in England, the moment in which she catches a last glimpse of the land of her youth is one of the emotionally intense of her existence. The life she leaves may have been one of hardship, even of bitterness, and the life she goes to may be one of ease; but binding her to the land behind her are the ties of blood and childish remembrances of home—ties which shape themselves as mightily in the mud-cabin or the back slum of the city as in the palace. She is leaving the one spot on earth where she is an object of interest and importance to her fellows. When she arrives in the new world it is to that home that she sends the record of her marriage—there that she knows the story of her sorrows and her gains will be waited for! In the hour of childbirth it is to the women of her own blood "at home" that her heart turns with yearning; and as years go by "my people" and "my home" gain a colour and size they would never have borne if near at hand. She thinks of them as a denizen of the earth, removed to one of the fixed stars, might think of this old planet, without remembrances of its aches and pains! And as her children grow up, the first stories they hear are not of Colonial things and people, but European—of fields in which little children gather buttercups and daisies, of ice and snow, and the roaring life of cities; and as the little Colonial children play in the hot sun upon the kopjes among stapelias and aloes, they think how beautiful those fields must be, and wonder how the daisy-chains are made, and how primroses smell! and at night in their little hot beds they dream of ice and snow, and fancy they hear the hum of vast cities. Even the names of our European relatives who have played in those fields and lived in those cities have acquired a certain mythological charm for us, and the Aunt this and the Uncle that, of whom our mothers tell us, they are not the commonplace, material uncles and aunts who may live in the next street and be seen every day. They are real, yet invisible, like the actual presence in the Holy Wafer of real flesh and blood, yet removed from sight, like the heroes of a mythological fairy tale! Europe and its life are to us, from our earliest years, the ideal and mysterious, with which we have yet some real and practical tie.

No European who has not grown up in the Colony, being born of pure European parentage, can understand the full force of this Mother tradition.

Like the odour of an unknown plant or flower, it must be experienced to be comprehended. Nor does it die out with the first generation. The mother transmits it to her daughter, and the daughter to her child. It is the echo of this legend which goes so largely to form that curious body of sentiment with which the most commonplace colonist visits Europe for the first time. The most sensitive man, growing up in the original home of his race, does not understand this subtle and delicate emotion; and the most hard-shell man of business among us is not untouched by it when he sets his feet for the first time on the old-race shores.

"And this is England! And this is Europe!" It is as though he woke up in a kind of fairy land! The tile cottages with the moss upon them, the hedgerows, the village greens with the churches, the blue-bells in the woods—he has seen them all before—in a dream. In the roar of the great city curious emotions come to him. As he drives in the omnibus the conductor calls, "Shoreditch!" and he starts and looks out. Above him is the great church tower—

When I grow rich,

Say the bells of Shoreditch!

and again he is one of the group of children holding each others' hands to play at "oranges and lemons" in a Colonial garden. "So that Shoreditch we sang of under the fig-trees was a real place! No doubt the great bells hang up there!"—and for a moment the prosaic back-slum is an inverted childhood's fairy-land.

And there are perhaps few among us who, on our first visit, do not at some time creep away to find ourselves in some spot to which we do not wish our acquaintance to accompany us. It may be a street in a great city, or a village in a German forest, or an English parsonage; but we feel we are bound to it with a tie others may not touch. Perhaps it is only a shop-window at the corner of Finsbury Pavement at which we stand gazing in, because we know that sixty years before a little child with bright eyes and rosy cheeks came here, wrapped up in her furs, and holding her mother's hand, to buy her Christmas doll! And we stand gazing into it till we turn away sharply, fancying the people see what we feel. Or we go to a little country village; no one tells us the way from the station; but we see a church tower and an old elm-tree we have heard of; and as we walk towards them down the village street, we would like to run up to every one we meet, and say, "Oh! don't you see, we are come home again!" We stand at the parsonage gate and look over at the trim lawn, and the ivy on the bow-windows; and we go away. There is a stile where we know a man and a woman once talked on summer evenings, when they did not yet dream that the life they promised to spend together was to be lived out far over the seas, in the strange land which their children's children were to inherit. We wander into the churchyard, and brush the ivy from the gravestones; we stand at last before what we seek—years of European frost and rain have half obliterated the writing on the stones; we trace the letters with our fingers; the names are names we know, and which our kindred in the land across the seas will bear for generations. And so it comes to pass that we still call Europe "home"; though when we go there we may find nothing to bear witness to the fact, but a few broken headstones in a country churchyard—yet the land is ours![12]

This bond, light as air, yet strong as iron, those early mothers of the Boer race could hardly have woven between the hearts of their children and the country they come from. Alone in the world, without relatives who had cared sufficiently for them to save them from the hard mercy of a public asylum, these women must have carried away few of the warm and tender memories happier women bear to plant in the hearts of their children. The bare boards and cold charity of a public institution are not the things of which to whisper stories to little children. The ships that bore these women to South Africa carried them towards the first "Land of Good Hope" that ever dawned on their lives; and the day in which they landed at Table Bay and first trod on African soil, was also the first in which they became individuals, desired and sought after, and not mere numbers in a printed list. In the arms of the rough soldiers and sailors who welcomed them, they found the first home they had known; and the little huts on the banks of the Liesbeek, and the simple boards at which they presided, were the first at which they had been able to look round and see only the faces of those bound to them by kindly ties. To such women it was almost inevitable that, from the moment they landed, South Africa should be "home," and Europe be blotted out: the first generation born of these women and the free, tieless soldiers and sailors with whom they mated, probably looked on South Africa as does their latest descendant to-day. On their lips, when they looked at the valley of Stellenbosch, or the slopes of Table Mountain, the words—Ons Land—meant all they mean on the lips of the Transvaal Boer or the Free State Burgher of to-day,—"Our Land; the one and only land we know of, and care for, wish to know of, have any tie or connection with!"

If it be objected that the number of these women was too small to have permanently influenced the attitude of the Boer race in its relation towards Africa and the home countries, it must be answered, that small as their number was, they were numerous in proportion to the whole stock from which the race rose. For it must always be borne in mind in studying the South African Boer, how very small that stock was. He was produced—as are all suddenly developed, marked and permanent varieties in the human or animal world—by the close interbreeding of a very small number of progenitors.[13] The handful of soldiers and sailors who first landed, a few agriculturists and their families, the band of orphaned girls, and a small body of French exiles, to be referred to later on, constitute the whole parent stock of the Boer people. From this small stock, by a process of breeding in and in, they have developed, there having been practically no addition made to the breed for the last two hundred years; the comparatively large numbers to which they have attained have entirely to be accounted for by the fact of their personal vigour, very early marriages, and prolific rate of increase. Thus the Boer represents rather a clan or family than a nation; and there is probably no true Boer from the Zambesi to the Cape who does not hold a common strain of blood with almost every other Boer he meets. Each Boer has in him, probably, at least a drop of the blood of these women; and their emotional and intellectual peculiarities can hardly have failed to leave their mark, if slight, upon the racial development.

But we must turn now to the most interesting point in the early history of the Boer, and one which alone would fully account for his attitude towards Europe, and for many other of his unique characteristics.

In and about the year 1688, thirty-six years after the first landing of Van Riebeek and his handful of men, there arrived at the Cape a body of French Protestant refugees, numbering in all, men, women and children, somewhat under two hundred souls. These people, driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were offered an asylum in South Africa by the Dutch Government, which they accepted. They were not an ordinary body of emigrants, but represented almost to a man and a woman that golden minority which is so remorselessly winnowed from the dross of the conforming majority by all forms of persecution directed against intellectual and spiritual independence. Mere agriculturists, vine-dressers and mechanics, with but a small sprinkling of persons belonging to the professional classes, these men yet constitute an aristocracy—ennobled, not through the fiat of any monarch, but selected by that law deep-lying in the nature of things, which has ordained that where men shall be found having the force to stand alone, and suffer for abstract conviction, there also shall be found the individuality, virility and power which founds great peoples and marks dominant races.

The fate of the South African Boer was safe from the moment these men came to mingle their blood with his; as the fate of the North American States was safe when the Mayflower had crossed with its load of dissentient Englishmen; as the fate of the Spanish colonies would have been safe, had Spain, in place of cauterizing her growing points in the bonfires of the squares of Toledo and Madrid, simply nipped them off from the parent tree and transplanted them alive in her colonies in the New World, there to beget a newer and stronger Spain. One is sometimes astonished at certain qualities found in the South African Boer, till one recalls the fact that a strain of this uncompromising, self-guiding blood runs in his veins; making him, what often in his lowest and poorest conditions he yet remains—an aristocrat!

On the arrival of these men at the Cape, the Dutch East India Company portioned them out lands to cultivate, mainly in the lovely valleys of Stellenbosch, French-Hoek, and Drakenstein. At the time of their arrival they formed probably about one-sixth of the whole population. How rapidly they increased and how large is the share their blood holds in the Boer race may be noted if one run one's eye over the list of the occupants of any district or village inhabited by Boers, and marks how great the number of French names which will occur. There are districts in the Western Province of the Colony in which these names largely predominate over those of Dutch or German origin; and even in the Free State and Transvaal, they are numerous to an extent which their original numbers would not have led us to expect. Of our most noted of Cape families, many bear these names; the De Villiers, the Jouberts, the Du Toits, the Naudès—and if other names, such as the Reitzes, Van Aarts, Hofmeyrs or Krugers, are not less widely known, it will generally be found on analysis that the proportion of French blood even in these families is as large as in those whose patronymics are purely French. There is probably not a Boer in South Africa at the present day whose blood is not richly touched by that of the Huguenot.

But it was not only or mainly by bringing to the formation of the new race this strong and select strain of blood that the Huguenot influenced the Boer, and through him the future of South Africa. It is he who has rendered permanent and complete the severance from Europe to which we have referred.

When the ordinary settler leaves Europe he goes out more or less under the ægis of his mother country, and for a time at least, wherever he may settle, he still feels her flag wave over him; if wronged, it is to the representative of his mother land that he turns; if he settles in an uncivilized country, it is as the forerunner of those of his people who shall follow him that he takes possession of it. Should he go to a territory already colonized by another European race, he may lose himself more quickly in the existing organization. But still, for generations, the Irishman, Scotsman, German or Italian often feels a certain bond between himself and his parent land; and Europe as a whole holds a large place in his consideration.

Not infrequently his national feeling is intensified by transplantation. Nowhere on the surface of the globe were toasts to the health of the Queen and the Royal Family, and to the success of old England, more heartily drunk than by the British settlers of 1820, when they ate their first Christmas dinner, beneath the blazing South African sun, under the kunee trees of Lower Albany. To these men, as to the English colonists all the world over, the strength and dignity of their position lay in the fact that they, a minute portion of the great English nation, had come to this new land to implant themselves, a branch from the old stock, which should in time take root and grow to be a giant worthy of its parent tree. They felt themselves the ambassadors of a great people, the bearers of a flag which waved over every quarter of the globe; the representatives of a power which they believed to be the most beneficent and powerful on earth.[14] So these men named their little villages and their districts after the men and places of the old country—"East London," "Port Alfred," "King William's Town," "Queen's Town," "Lower Albany"—and their farms bore often the names of the homes in England from which they came. Socially, religiously, and more especially politically, they strove to reproduce, line by line, as accurately as circumstances would permit, the national life they had left. "So-and-so things are done at home." That settled, as it still to-day to a large extent settles, all argument. To-day the third generation of these men has arrived at adult years; but consciousness of national identity with the parent people is hardly dimmed. The young English African who has never been in Europe may boast that South Africa is the finest country on earth, and swagger of its skies, and wild, free life or, ridiculously enough, boast of the civilization which it has attained; he may resent bitterly any interference with what he considers his material rights on the part of the "Home Government." But turn to the same man and ask him what his nationality may be, suggest that he may possibly be of any other race than his own, and you will not twice repeat your question—

For in spite of all temptation

To belong to another nation,

He remains an Englishman!

Deep in the heart of every English-speaking colonist is a chord which responds to the name of the parent people as to no other; and the depth of the emotion is curiously exemplified in the most insignificant matters. That seemingly imbecile passion which causes Colonials to drag down and retain as mementos the curtains of a bed on which a British princeling has slept; the comic manner in which the average colonist will gravely inquire of you on your return from Europe whether you have "seen the Queen," and their solemnity in all matters pertaining to ancient and almost worn-out English institutions, all have in them an element radically different from that which would animate the average home Englishman, were he to act in a like manner; an element not to be found in the sycophant crowds which loll open-mouthed about St. James's on the afternoon of a Drawing-room; and which is radically distinct from the servility which bows before mere wealth and success. The colonist is perhaps rather more inclined than others to criticize mercilessly the princeling or dignitary sent out from home (and does so very freely after his arrival, when his gilt has worn off him); but behind the individual man lies something of which he is the representative, and it is this which causes him to have for the colonist a quite peculiar value. The enthusiasm he awakens is an enthusiasm for an emblem, not a man; for the representative of English nationality, not for the ruler. The difference between the feeling of an Englishman in the colony and the Englishman at home, with regard to all the insignia and emblems of the common national life, forces itself strongly on the notice of one who visits England for the first time. There is an absence of the element of passion and romance in the "Man at Home's" way of viewing these things; the difference between these attitudes being best compared by likening it to the difference between the feelings of two men, one of whom remains in the house of his parents and possesses it, the other of whom leaves it for ever. If outside the house windows grows a great lilac tree, it is simply a material part of the house he inhabits to the man who possesses it. As long as the branches shade the window, or do not damage the walls, he regards it with passive approval; when they begin to obstruct the view, and the roots interfere with the foundations, he has not the slightest remorse in lopping off the branches, or, if need be, uprooting the whole tree; the whole house is still his, the tree he regards from the utilitarian standpoint. On the other hand, to the man who has left the home of his childhood and gone to a foreign land—if one should by any chance send him a sprig from the old tree that grew before the windows, he would wrap it up and carry it about buried in his breast—the small sprig is an emblem to him of the old home which once was his, and to which he is still bound by ties of affection, though severed for ever by space. It would be as irrelevant to accuse the one man of insensibility because he did not weep over the chopped-down branches, as to accuse the other of emotional weakness because he grew tender over his sprig. The Englishman in England needs no visible emblem of that national life in the centre of which he is imbedded, and of which he forms an integral part. To the Englishman separated from that life by wide space and material interests, the smallest representative of the old nation has a powerful emotional value. It is to him what the lock of his mistress's hair is to an absent lover; he treasures it and kisses it to assure himself of her existence. If she were present he would probably notice the lock little. The princeling is our lock of hair, the Union Jack our sprig of lilac.

Even in the seemingly childish deference to manners and fashions imported from home, along with less exalted motives, this idealizing instinct plays its part. Nowhere on earth's surface are English-speaking men so consciously Anglo-Saxon as in the new lands they have planted. You may forget in England that you are an Englishman; you can never forget it in Africa.

The colonist will oppose England if he fancies she interferes with the material interests of the land he inhabits, as the married man takes the part of his wife, should he fancy his own mother seeks to over-dominate her. The wife is the bearer of his children, the minister to his material comforts; but deep in his heart there is a sense in which the mother has a place the wife will never fill. If his wife die he may soon find another, and her hold will be lost and her place taken; but his relation towards his mother is ineradicable; more changeless because more purely ideal and immaterial. She is the one woman he will never allow man or woman to speak slightingly of while he lives. He may quarrel with her himself, may even wound her, but he will allow no other man to touch her by word or in deed.

If to-morrow England lay prostrate, as France lay in 1871, with the heel of the foreigner on her throat, there are sixty millions of English-speaking men and women all the world over who would leap to their feet. They would swear never to lie down again till they had seen her freed. Women would urge on sons and husbands and forego all luxury, and men would leave their homes and cross the seas, if in so doing there was hope of aiding her. It will never be known what colonial Englishmen feel for the national nest till a time comes when it may be in need of them.

Our dearest bluid to do her guid

We'd give it her and a' that!

For it may be more than questioned whether even brother Jonathan, in spite of the back score against her and the large admixture of foreign blood in his veins, would sit still to see the foreigner crush the nesting-place of his people; to see the cradle of his tongue, the land of Chaucer and Shakespeare trampled down by men who know not their speech. And the Irish-Englishman all the world over, forgetting six centuries of contumely would, with the magnanimity of his generous race, stand shoulder to shoulder with his English brother, as he stood and died beside him in every country under the sun. Blood is thicker than water—and language binds closer than blood.

The England of to-day may disregard this emotional attitude towards herself and her colonists, and by persistent indifference and coldness may kill it, as a father by neglect may alienate the heart of his son, and turn to stone what was once throbbing flesh. And it is fully possible that as England of the past, when her government was conducted by an ignorant, monarchical aristocracy, despised her colonies because they were small democracies, and alienated them by ruthlessly using them for her own purposes; so the England of to-day, becoming rapidly a democracy may, through the supine indifference and self-centred narrowness inherent in the nature of over-worked uncultivated masses, kill out for ever the possibilities which might arise from the full recognition and cultivation of this emotion. But the fact remains that to-day this bond exists; the English-speaking colonist is bound to the birthplace of his speech; and little obtrusive as this passion may be, it is yet one of the most pregnant social phenomena of the modern world, one capable of modifying the future, not only of Anglo-Saxon peoples, but of the human race.[15]

We ask no forgiveness for thus digressing, for until the attitude of other European colonists towards their home lands has been fully grasped, the very exceptional position of the Boer, and the effect of his attitude on himself and South Africa, and the importance of the Huguenot influence in producing this attitude, cannot be understood.

So complete has been the Boer's severance from his fatherlands in Europe, both France and Holland, that for him they practically do not exist. For two hundred years their social and political life has rolled on unrecked of by him; Paris and The Hague are no nearer to his heart than Madrid or Vienna. He will swear more lustily at you if you call him a Frenchman or a Hollander than should you call him an Englishman or a German; and we have known primitive Boers who have vigorously denied that they had even originally descended from either Hollanders or Frenchmen.

The Huguenot has caused this severance in two ways.

Firstly, through the fact of his being a religious exile, and an exile of a peculiar type.

The exiled Englishmen who founded the Northern States of America, though they might wipe the dust off their feet against the land they left, did not cut that land wholly out of their affections and sympathies. A Government party, dominant for the moment, had made it impossible for them to continue their own form of worship in peace; but in the land they left, half their countrymen were bound to them by the closest ties of spiritual and intellectual sympathy, and were a party so strong as soon to become dominant. It was not England and its people who expelled them, but a step-motherly Government. Therefore they founded "New England" and clung to the old.

The Huguenot ancestor of the Boer left a country in which not only the Government, but the body of his fellows were at deadly variance with him; in which his religion was an exotic and his mental attitude alien from that of the main body of the people.

To these men, when they shook off the dust of their feet against her, France became the visible embodiment of the powers of evil; her rule was the rule of Agag, whom the Lord should yet hew in pieces; her people were the children of Satan, given over to believe a lie, and her fields were the plains of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which in judgment the Almighty would yet rain down fire and brimstone; a righteous Lot fled from them in horror with all that he had. To these homeless fugitives the Europe that they had left was as the "house of bondage." The ships which bore them to South Africa were the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord their God, in which He bore His chosen to the Land of His Promise. As the Huguenot paced the deck of his ship and saw the strange stars of the Southern Hemisphere come out above him, like Abraham of old he read in them the promise of his covenant-keeping God:—"To thee and to thy seed shall the land be given and they shall inherit it. Look up and see the stars of heaven if thou canst count them: so shall thy seed be for multitude; like sand, like fine sand on the sea-shore. And when thou comest to the land that I shall give thee, thou shalt drive out the heathen from before thee."

And as he entered Table Bay, and for the first time the superb front of Table Mountain broke upon him, he saw in it his first token from his covenant-keeping God—"The land that I shall give thee!"

And the beautiful valleys of Stellenbosch, French-Hoek and the Paarl, in which he settled, were to him no mere terrestrial territories on which to plant and sow; they were the direct gifts of his God; the answers to prayers; the fulfilment of a divine covenant; a fief which he held, not through the fiat of any earthly sovereign, but directly from the hand of the Lord his God. The vines and fig-trees which he planted, and under which he sat, were not merely the result of his labour; they were the trees which aforetime he had seen in visions when he wandered a homeless stranger in Europe—"The land that I shall give thee!" To this man France was dead from the moment he set his foot on South African soil, and South Africa became his. Unlike the Englishman, the Huguenot no more thought of perpetuating the memory of France in "New Parises" and "New Orleanses" than the Jew, when he had escaped from the land of Egypt, thought of recalling the cities of Pharaoh in the names of the towns in Palestine. There is hardly a spot in Africa named by the French Huguenot in memory of his land: he called his farms "Springbok-fontein," "Beeste Kraal," "Jakals-fontein," and "Kat-kop."[16] Better to him has seemed a South African jackal or wild-cat than all the cities of France.

Thus to the Huguenot, not only was France the object of his abhorrence, and Europe a matter of indifference, but the South African land became from the very moment he landed the object of a direct and absorbing religious veneration, excluding all other national feelings. And in very slightly modified form he has transmitted this state of feeling to his latest descendant. Deep in the hearts of every old veld-schoen-wearing Boer that you may meet, side by side with an almost religious indifference to other lands and peoples, lies this deep, mystical and impersonal affection for South Africa. Not for the land, as inhabited by human beings, and formed into social and political organizations of which he is a part; not for the land, regarded as a social and political entity alone, is it that he feels this affection. It is for the actual physical country, with its plains, rocks and skies, that his love and veneration are poured out (absolutely incomprehensible as this may appear to the money-making nineteenth-century Englishman). The primitive Boer believes he possesses this land by a right wholly distinct from that of the aborigines whom he dispossesses, or the Englishmen who followed him; a right with which no claim of theirs can ever conflict. His feeling for South Africa is not in any way analogous to the feeling of the Johannesburg digger or speculator for the land in which he has "made his pile," nor even to that of the ordinary colonist for the territory in which his habitation lies; nor is it quite of the same nature as the passion of the old-world Swiss for his mountains, nor of the Norwegian for his fjords. Its only true counterpart is to be found in the attitude of the Jew towards Palestine—"When I forget thee, O Jerusalem!" His feeling towards it is a faith, not a calculation. It is as useless to attempt to influence the Boer by showing him that he will derive material advantage by giving up the rule of his land to others, as it is to try and persuade an ardent lover that he gains by sharing his mistress with one who will contribute to her support. His feeling for South Africa is not primarily based on utilitarian calculations or considerations of the material advantages to accrue to him from its possession; it is the one vein of idealism and romance underlying his seemingly prosaic and leaden existence. Touch the Boer on the side of South Africa, and at once, for the moment, he is hero and saint—his feeling for it a religion.

It has been from the complete failure to grasp this attitude of the Boer towards South Africa that curious mistakes have been made by far-seeing politicians and keen diplomatists in dealing with South African problems; mistakes only to be comprehended when one considers that curious inability inherent in the so-called "practical intellect" in all ages to comprehend anything beyond the narrow aims and ambitions which constitute its own little world. It is this inability which so often makes the conduct of these shrewd people, when they have to deal with the wider problems and deeper emotions of human life, like the conduct of a child who, to remove a speck of dust from the eye, should insert a needle and stir it about in the living substance.[17]

The Huguenot, by implanting this religious passion for South Africa in the heart of the Boer, and by the fact that he brought with him no political sympathies with France, helped to sever the Boer from his parent States; but even these influences while they would account for his division from his parents' nationalities, would not alone account for that complete severance from the common social and intellectual life of Europe, and from all civilized European societies, which characterizes the Boer of the past and of to-day, and we must seek for its cause further.

When the Huguenots first arrived at the Cape, they had little to complain of in the treatment they received at the hands of the Dutch East India Company—lands were given them side by side with the earlier emigrants, by whom they were kindly received. But the Government of the Dutch East India Company, then dominant at the Cape, like that of all commercial companies, was a despotism, and resembled rather the dictatorial rule existing on board a troopship than any form of government we are now accustomed to picture as existing in a young European settlement. When the Huguenots landed their speech was French, and the ruling powers disapproved of it, and determined to exterminate it, and substitute at once the Dutch language. A decree was passed prohibiting its public use. It might not be used in the churches, nor taught to the children in the schools. The Huguenots resented this enactment. Smaller in numbers, but superior in culture and intelligence, they were unwilling to see their speech forcibly submerged; and there was a time when they went so far as to talk of physical resistance. But in the end they were subdued, and within a generation the French language was extinct. The old grandmother might still mumble it in her chair in the corner, or sing its nursery rhymes to her grandchildren in it, but they no longer understood her; law and arbitrary force had done their work. We are inclined to believe that no single autocratic action on the part of any South African Government has ever so deeply influenced the future of South Africa and its people as this seemingly small proceeding, influencing only a few hundred folk.

To show how this has happened we must somewhat digress.

The language spoken by the Boer of to-day is called "the Taal," i.e. "the Language." It is not French, nor is it Dutch, nor is it even in the usual acceptation of the word a dialect of Dutch; but it is a form of speech based on that language. It is used at the present day all over South Africa by the Boers and half-castes as their only speech; it is found in its greatest purity in the Free State, Transvaal, and frontier districts, where it has been least exposed to scholastic and foreign influences during the last few years. To analyze fully this tiny but interesting variety of speech, would take us far beyond our limits. It differs from the Dutch of the Hollander, not as archaic forms of speech in Europe often differ from the literary, as the Italian of the Ligurian peasant from that of the Florentine, or the Somersetshire or Yorkshire dialects from the language of the London newspapers; these archaic European dialects not only often represent the earlier form of the language, but are often richer in varied idioms and in the power of expressing subtle and complex thoughts than are their allied literary forms. The relation of the Taal to Dutch is of a quite different kind. The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language, and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections, and have been otherwise clipped. The plurals, which in Dutch are formed in various and complex ways, the Taal forms by an almost universal addition of an "e"; and the verbs, which in Dutch are as fully and expressively conjugated as in English or German, in the Taal drop all persons but the third person singular. Thus the verb "to be," instead of being conjugated as in the Dutch of Holland and in analogy with all other European languages, thus runs:—Ik is, Je is, Hij is, Ons is, Yulle is, Hulle is,—which would answer in English to: "I is," "thou is," "he is," "we is," "you is," "they is"! And not only so, but of the commonest pronouns many are altered out of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of Dutch extraction, most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable. A very few words are from Malay and native sources; but so sparse is the vocabulary and so broken are its forms, that it is impossible in the Taal to express a subtle intellectual emotion, or abstract conception, or a wide generalization; and a man seeking to render a scientific, philosophic, or poetical work in the Taal, would find his task impossible. The literary artist who has tried to introduce into his work of art in any European language a picture of Boer life, knows how impossible it has been to find any organized dialect which would correspond to it.[18] In English neither the Scotch nor country dialects, nor the Irish brogue, nor the pithy inverted forms of city slang will answer. To a certain extent he will be able to preserve its form and spirit in copying the manner of a little child, as it lisps its mother tongue. But this would not preserve all its peculiarities. Its true counterpart is only to be found in the "pigeon" English of a Chinaman or, better still, in the Negro dialects of the Southern American States. In the stories of Brer-Fox and Brer-Rabbit, as told by the old Southern slave in Uncle Remus, we have one of the few literary examples of such a speech as the Taal. In both languages there is the same poverty of vocabulary, the same abbreviated condition of words, the same clipping of forms, and the same much larger intelligence in the speakers than ill-formed language gives them the power of expressing—a thing which can never happen where a people has slowly shaped its own language—and, as a result, the same tendency to suggest indirectly ideas which the speaker has not the power of directly stating, from which results the irresistible humour of both dialects. It is often complained of by persons lately from England, that when the English South African has a joke to make, or comic story to tell, he lapses into the Taal, which is not understood by the newcomer; the truth being that it is the use of the Taal which transforms an ordinary sentence into a joke, and makes the simplest story irresistibly comic. There is hardly a South African that has not at some time told a story in the Taal who, when called upon to translate it for the benefit of some stranger, has not found that the humour had evaporated and the laugh gone. Merely to attempt to express a deep passion or complex idea in this dialect is to be often superbly humorous. The story is told of two Cape students whose Edinburgh landlady gave them notice to quit because their laughter disturbed her other lodgers. On inquiry it turned out that they were, for their own diversion, engaged in translating the book of Job into the Taal! And so entirely is the Dutch of South Africa removed from the rich sonorous Dutch of Holland, both in structure and sound, that we were lately requested by a woman, whose native speech was the Taal, to come to her aid, as her newly arrived gardener was a German, whose speech she could not therefore understand. On the gardener appearing, we found he was a Hollander, recently from Amsterdam, and speaking the most excellent Dutch!

So widely in fact has this dialect separated itself from Dutch that the Boer boy at the Cape working for an examination finds it as hard to pass in literary Dutch as in English or French, and it not infrequently occurs that the Boer boy is plucked in Dutch who passes in all other subjects. Between the language of the Camera Obscura and the Paarl's Patriot there is hardly more affinity than between the old Saxon of Alfred's day and the slang of a modern London street boy.[19]

In answer to the question, "How did this little speech arise?" it is sometimes suggested that the original soldiers and sailors who founded the settlement being largely Frisian and wholly uneducated, never spoke Dutch at all, but a dialect; and that, being mainly uncultured persons, and using no literature, their speech easily underwent further disintegration. On the other hand, it has been said that the Taal has been formed by the intercourse between the Dutchman and his slaves, and the aboriginal races of the country; that these people, obliged to use an imperfect Dutch, taught their broken lingo to their masters' children, which has so become the language of the Boer.

Something is to be said for both views, more especially for the second. At the present day the Taal is the only tongue of the many thousands of Half-castes which have resulted from the union of the Boer with his slaves; and it is exactly such a broken form of speech as does arise, when a large body of adults are suddenly obliged to learn and use a foreign tongue, as was the case with the slaves. But neither of these theories seems to us wholly to cover the ground. In the Southern States of America for a hundred years slave nurses brought up English children, but not the slightest effect on their English speech was produced, and nowhere in America is a purer English spoken than by the descendants of the Southern planters. Even allowing that, being uncultured, the forefathers of the Boer might more easily have let their speech slip than was the case with the more cultured planters, it still seems unlikely that a people so rigidly and exceptionally conservative as the Boer has shown himself to be, even in the smallest details of daily life, during his two hundred years in South Africa, should suddenly and entirely have dropped his own pure language and accepted his speech from the hands of his despised dependents.

We put forward the suggestion with diffidence, perhaps to be corrected by those who have considered the matter more deeply, but it has appeared to us that, fully to account for the Taal, it is necessary to allow at least some place to the influence of the French Huguenot and the sudden suppression of his French speech.

A considerable body of adult persons, suddenly introduced into a population whose language they are abruptly and by force compelled to use as their own if, as in the case of the French Huguenots, they are socially the equals, and intellectually the superiors, of the people among whom they settle, and if they at once proceed to intermarry with them, may, and almost must, powerfully influence and disintegrate the speech of the majority. The Taal is precisely such a speech as the adult Huguenots, arbitrarily and suddenly forced to forsake their own language and to adopt the Dutch, must have spoken. And that they should have imposed their broken language on their fellow colonists seems far more probable than that the slave should have done so. In language, yet more than in other human concerns, imitation is the expression of an unconscious admiration. The mannerisms, accent, and intonation of an individual, admired or loved, are almost inevitably caught; those of the despised unconsciously though carefully avoided. The cultured woman, labouring from philanthropic motives for ten years in the slums of a city among the outcast poor, finds her speech become almost more punctiliously correct through shrinking from the lower forms used about her; but were the same woman to love and admire a man of an uncultured class and live ten years with him, her speech would inevitably be tinged by his. The child follows the speech of its mother; the lover of the loved.[20]

At least the fact is certain, whatever else may be doubtful, that within one generation after the arrival of the Huguenot at the Cape the language spoken by the people was neither Dutch nor French, but that broken dialect we call the Taal.

If our supposition be correct, and the Taal was indeed partly formed in the way we have suggested, then that curious affection of the Boer for his little cramped dialect, which makes it second only to South Africa as the object of his passionate devotion, becomes comprehensible, and not only understandable but almost pathetic when we regard it not as a speech picked up from the group at the kitchen doorway, but as inherited from the best of his early forbears, and first shaped by the lips of the young Huguenot mother as she bent over the cradle of her half Dutch child, striving to shape her speech in the new and father tongue. If this be so, then the Taal is indeed what the Boer so often and so vociferously calls it—his "Moedertaal"; and one is bound to regard his feeling for it as one regards the feeling of a woman for her mother's old wedding-gown and faded orange blossoms—they may be mouldy and unfit for present-day use, but her tenderness for them is a matter for profound sympathy rather than ridicule.

If our supposition be correct and the Huguenot truly helped in the formation of the Taal, then his influence over the Boer, and through him over South Africa, has been, as we have said, almost unlimited. For the Taal has largely helped to make the Boer what he is.

It has been to him what its spinal column is to a vertebrate creature, that on which its minor peculiarities depend, and the key to its structure. It has been the prime conditioning element in his growth, beside which all others become secondary.

Naturalists tell us that on certain isolated mountain peaks, or on solitary islands, surrounded by deep oceans, there are sometimes found certain unique forms of plant and animal life, peculiar to that one spot, and not to be found elsewhere on the earth; and that, further, there is nothing in the climate or the soil to account for the fact that this special little plant, or winged insect, or tortoise, should be found there and nowhere else. The whole fact is a mystery, till science makes a further discovery. It finds all over the surface of the earth, the fossilized remains of just such, or analogous plants or animals, and then the mystery is solved; and it is clear that our unique species have no particular relation to the spot in which they are found, nor have they been evolved through its influence. They are but the survivals of forms of life once universal, which have been preserved in those situations when the rest of their species perished, through the action of some isolating medium—the inaccessible height of the mountain crags or the width of the ocean—which has preserved them from the forces which have modified or destroyed their race elsewhere. Such a unique human species is the true South African Boer. Like the marsupials of Australia, or the mammoth tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, he is incomprehensible while we regard his peculiarities as evolved by the material conditions about him; he becomes fully comprehensible only when we recognize the fact that he is a survival of the past; that the peculiar faiths, habits, superstitions, and virtues now peculiar to him were once the common properties of all European peoples; that he is merely a child of the seventeenth century surviving on though modified by climate and physical surroundings into the nineteenth, and that the true isolating medium through which this remarkable survival has been effected has been mainly the Taal.

If in the struggle for existence between the different forms of speech in the early days of the Colony, either pure French or pure Dutch had conquered and become the language of the French-Huguenot settler, if he had inherited as his birthright any recognized form of literary European speech, the Boer as we know him could not have existed; and in the place of this unique and interesting child of the seventeenth century, wandering about on South African plains when almost all his compeers in Europe have vanished, we should have had merely an ordinary inhabitant of the nineteenth century. For when we come to consider it, it has not been only the nature of his life in South Africa nor his geographical severance from Europe which has been the cause of his peculiar mental attitude and social condition, and which divides him from the large body of the nineteenth century European folk.

That complexus of knowledge and thought, with its resulting modes of action and feeling, which for the want of a better term we are accustomed to call "the spirit of the age," and which binds into a more or less homogeneous whole the life of all European nations, is created by the action of speech and mainly of opinion ossified and rendered permanent, portable, in the shape of literature. Even in the middle ages it was through this agency that the solidarity of European life was attained. Slow as were the physical means of transport and difficult as in the absence of printing was the diffusion of literature, the interchange was enormous. Mainly through the medium of the Latin tongue, held in common by the cultured of all civilized European countries, thought and knowledge travelled from land to land more slowly, but not less surely, than to-day. The ambassador, the student, and the monk in their travels exchanged thoughts with the men of foreign countries through its medium, and the religious meditation poured forth by the monk in his cell in Spain, the romance shaped by the French poet, the chemical discoveries of the Italian professor, once committed to Latin manuscript, were the property of all Europe. In the pocket of the travelling monk or wandering scholar carefully preserved copies crept from land to land; from the learned class the knowledge of their contents filtered down to the wealthy, and from these to the people, till at last in the German cathedrals were sung the hymns of the Spanish monk, the Dutch chemist perfected the experiments of the Italian, and the romance of the Frenchman, translated from Latin into the colloquial tongues, was sung from end to end of Europe, beside peasant-hearths and baronial castles; and whether we study those centuries in Italy or England, in France or Spain, their spirit, though modified in each, is essentially one.

At the present day, though the use of a common literary tongue has ceased among us, the interchange of thought with its resulting unity is yet more complete. The printing-press, the electric-telegraph which gives to language an almost omnipresent voice, and above all, the habit of translating from one language into another whatever may be of general interest, are more completely binding all nations throughout the world where a literary speech prevails, into one body; until, at the present day, civilized men in the most distant corners of the earth are in some ways more closely united intellectually than were the inhabitants of neighbouring villages in the middle ages, or than savages divided by half a mile of forest are at the present day. The chemical discovery made to-day by a man of science in his laboratory and recorded in the pages of the scientific journal, is modifying the work in a thousand other laboratories throughout Europe before the end of the week. The picture or ideal of life, painted by the poet or writer of fiction, once clad in print travels round the globe, modifying the actions of men and women before the ink with which it was first written has well dried out; and the news that two workmen were shot at a strike in Hungary, committed to the telegraph wire, will, before night—and quicker than the feet of an old crone could have carried news from house to house in a village—have crossed from Europe to America and Australia, and before to-morrow half a million working men and women, separated from each other by oceans, will have cursed between their teeth. Probably to no man is the part played by literature in creating this unity in the civilized world so clear as to the writer himself, with whom it is often a matter not of intellectual interference, but of ocular demonstration. What he has evolved in a sleepless night in London or Paris, or as he paced in the starlight under the Southern Cross, if he commit it to writing and confide it to the pages of some English review will, within two months, have passed from end to end of the globe: the Europeanized Japanese will be reading it in his garden at Tokio; the colonist will have received it with his weekly mail; it will be on the library tables of England and America. Even if his thought be thrown into the more permanent form of the separate volume, it may be months or years, but if it be of value in itself, it will as surely go round the globe on the current of the European speech. The Australian will be found reading it at the door of his house on the solitary sheep-run; the London city clerk, as he rides through the fog in the omnibus, will take it from his pocket; the Scotch workman will spend his half-holiday over it; the duchess will have fingered it in her boudoir; the American girl may have wept over it, and the educated Hindu have studied it. A little later on if it have value, it will, through translation, pass the limits of national speech. The German student will be carrying it in his breast-pocket as he walks along the Rhine; and the French critic will be examining it with a view to to-morrow's article; the Russian will be perusing it in its French dress; and even the polygamous Turk, in his palace on the Bosphorus, will be scanning its pages between sips of coffee. Within a few years the writer may see on his table at the same moment a pile of letters from every corner of the globe, and from men of almost every race that commands a literature. The thoughts which have visited him in his solitary night will have brought him into communion, closer than any of physical contact, with men and women in every corner of the globe; and as he handles the little pile—dating from a British Residency at Pequ, a cattle-ranch in California, an unknown village in Russia—he realizes perhaps with surprise, that even his own slight thread of thought forms one of those long cords which, passing from land to land and from man to man, are slowly but surely weaving humanity into one. Perhaps to the modern writer alone is that "human solidarity," transcending all bounds of nation and race, for which the French soldier on the barricades of Paris declared it was necessary for him to die, not merely an idea, but a solid and practical reality. His kindred are not only those dwelling in the same house with him, but that band of men and women all the world over of whatever race or colour in whom his thought is germinating; for him almost alone at the present day is the circle of nationality, which for the ordinary man still shuts in so large a part of his interest and sympathies, obliterated by a still wider, which knows no distinction of speech, race, or colour—his readers are his people, and all literary peoples his fellow-countrymen.

So powerful, indeed, is the unifying effect of this interchange of thought that to-day the mental life of all countries sharing European literature may be compared to one body of water in a great inland sea; divided indeed into bays, gulfs and inlets, but permeated everywhere by the same currents and forming one common mass. The three large and almost international forms of speech, English, French and German, may well be compared to main currents, a particle committed to whose waves is instantly swept abroad everywhere; yet the smallest form of literary speech, such as the Dutch or Portuguese, does not shut out the people using it from the common interchange. Like little bays, divided from the main body by a low sand-bar, before which the waves of the outer currents may be delayed for a moment, but which they are sure to overleap sooner or later, bearing in all that the outer mass contains, and sweeping out to join the larger body all the deposits peculiar to the smaller, so into the smallest literary speech is sure to be borne, sooner or later, by means of translation, all of value that deposits itself in the larger life and literature of Europe, and all they have to contribute is borne out into the larger. The moralizings of a Russian reformer and the visions of the Norwegian playwright, for a moment confined within the limits of their narrower national tongues, are yet swept into the world-wide speeches and span the globe, adding an integral portion to "the spirit of the age," as certainly as though first couched in a world-wide tongue.

In this common life of literary European peoples, the African Boer has had, and could have, no part. Behind him, like a bar, two hundred years ago the Taal rose, higher and higher, and land-locked him in his own tiny lagoon. All that was common to the great currents of European life at the time of his severance from them, you will still find to-day in his tiny pool, if you take a handful of his mental water and analyse it, but hardly one particle of that which has been added since has found its way into him. His little speech, not only without literature, incapable of containing one, and comprehensible only to himself and his little band of compatriots, shut him off as effectively from the common growth and development of Europe as a wall of adamant. The superstitions, the virtues, the ideals of the seventeenth century, you will find faithfully mirrored in him; the growths, the upheavals, the dissolutions, the decays which have marked the nineteenth century have passed by without touching him in his Rip Van Winkle sleep behind his little Taal.

It is somewhat curious to reflect on all that he has missed. The Europe he left was a Europe still reddened by the fires that burned witches and heretics; Newton was a little child playing in Lincolnshire fields; Descartes had been in his grave two years; it was not twenty since Galileo had been obliged, before a Christian tribunal, to disclaim the heresy of the earth's movement; it was not fifty years since Bruno was burnt for asserting the unity of God and Nature, and Vanini at Toulouse for empiricism; and Calvin's murder of Servetus still tainted the spiritual air.

For the Boer, the awakening of human reason in the eighteenth century, with its stern demand for intellectual tolerance, and its enunciation of universal brotherhood, never existed. The cry for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, with which later on the heart of Europe leaped forth to grasp an ideal for which men's hands were not yet quite pure enough, but which rent the thunder-cloud of despotism brooding over Europe; the Napoleonic wars and the crash of thrones; the growth of physical science, re-shaping not only man's physical existence but yet more his social and ethical life, of these things the Boer behind his little Taal wall heard and felt nothing.

Even the rise of the commercial system during the last century, which has spread out its claw till it covers not only Europe, but is digging its nails into the muscular fibre of all the world, and which has enthroned in place of all the old ideals, national, religious and personal, simply one—wealth; and which seems to sit to-day, crowned over human life as no tyranny has ever done before—of this phase of modern life the Boer also knows nothing. He still believes there are things money cannot buy; that a man may have three millions of money in syndicate shares, and hold command over the labour of ten thousand workers, and yet be no better than he who goes out every morning in his leather trousers to tend his own sheep. Still less has the Boer caught the faintest sound of that deep whisper, which to-day is passing from end to end of the civilized world, questioning whether this commercial god be indeed the final god of the race; whether his throne might not yet fall as others have fallen before: a whisper which may at any moment break out into the wildest cry that has yet rung round earth—and humanity, breaking down the idol, may start on its march in search of a new shrine.

Of these two mighty movements, the one apparent and dominant everywhere, and the other silently riddling the ground beneath it into holes, till it sounds hollow beneath the foot—of these matters also the Boer knows nothing. As he is ignorant of the gracious and generous developments of the modern world, so he recks nothing of the diseases which have fastened on to it, or the reactions against them.

Even of those large external events which have marked the march of the civilized world during the last forty years few reports have reached him; or but a faint adumbration. The American Civil War of thirty-five years ago, when the foremost branch of the Anglo-Saxon peoples decided, amid a torrent of its own blood, what was to be the permanent attitude of advancing humanity on the greatest question of interhuman relations—of this he knows nothing. John Brown and Harper's Ferry are names as unfamiliar to him as Marathon and Thermopylæ; Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, Darwin, Whitman, Mill, Emerson, and Marx are as absolutely mere names to him as Jan Dikpens or Jan Bovenlander. Few of the stars shining over our heads now were in his firmament when he left Europe, nor was the dark shadow there which broods over us.

When one considers these things, then we understand our African Boer. There is then nothing puzzling in the fact that he, a pure-blooded European, descended from some of the most advanced and virile nations of Europe, and being no poor peasant crushed beneath the heel of others, but in many cases a wealthy landowner with flocks, herds, and crowds of dependents beneath him, and in his collective capacity governing States as large as European countries, should yet, in this latter half of the nineteenth century, possess on many matters a faith which has been outgrown by a London or Paris gamin; that he should hold fanatically that the sun does not move and repeat the story of Gideon to support his view; and that he often regards scab, itch, and various skin diseases affecting his stock as pre-ordained of an almighty intelligence which should not be interfered with by mere human remedies; that he looks often upon the insurance of public buildings as a direct insult to Jehovah, who, if he sends a fire to punish a people, should not be defeated by an insurance of the building;[21] that his faith in ghosts and witches is unshaken;—all this becomes comprehensible when we remember that his faiths, social customs and personal habits, so astonishing in the eyes of the modern nineteenth-century European, are nothing more than the survivals of the faiths and customs universal among our forefathers two hundred years ago; that they in no way originated with, or are peculiar to, the South African Boer.[22]

The fact that this survival, and his opposition to the modern spirit, is not merely the result of the Boer's geographical severance from Europe, and that it has largely depended on his little language, is made clearer when we glance at other emigrant European peoples. However far distant from Europe, in North America, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, wherever a European race has settled, if it has not (as in the case of the Spanish and the Portuguese in their South African and South American colonies) mingled its blood largely with that of the aborigines, then that translated branch is found, not only to retain its connection with European life and growth, but in many cases to lead in that growth. It is often remarked on as matter for wonder in these colonies how large is the percentage of individuals taking the lead in the social, material and intellectual life, who were reared among circumstances which most widely severed them from the external and material conditions of modern civilization. But there is no cause for this wonder. The European emigrant who settles in the backwoods of a new country, may rear his family in primeval solitude, they may grow up on the roughest fare and the closest contact with untamed nature; the man may have no education and little time or aptitude for imparting to his son culture or learning, but his speech is one of the earth's great tongues, spoken by one in fifteen or one in twenty of the inhabitants of the globe, and his son inherits it. The mother or grandmother may teach the child his letters from an old primer, and, for the rest, his education may be only that which nature gives to the wildest of her children. He may grow up without the sight of a city, and beyond the reach of the touch of luxury; but he has in his hand the key to all nineteenth-century civilization. Should a chance traveller pass at intervals of months or years, the boy may listen eagerly to his conversation; and if he leaves behind him a tattered book or the torn page of a six months' old newspaper, or if the lad's mother unearth from the bottom of an old trunk a couple of brown volumes brought by her mother or grandmother from Europe, the boy can spell them out and pore over them, and gain a glimpse into the world beyond. If, at seventeen or eighteen, he tires of the life of the backwood and desires to see the life beyond, he has only to shoulder his bundle, and at the end of a hundred or thousand miles he finds himself in a city. All about him may be strange at first; he is awkward in act, slow in speech, but there is not a word or a sound in the world about him that is not modifying him; the talk of the men in the lodging-house, the arguments of the men in the public-bar, the chatter at the street corners, the newspapers he takes up, the cheap books he buys for a few pence, open the modern world to him. In six months' time he may only be distinguishable from the men about him by his greater vigour or the more quiet strength which a contact with inanimate nature has left him. In five years' time, if he have inherited will and intelligence, you may find him the rising man of business or the self-taught but cultured student; in ten or fifteen more he may be the learned professor, the railway king, the foreign ambassador, the president of a state, or the writer with a world-wide reputation. Given that a man inherits as his birthright some literary European speech and attains some elementary knowledge of its letters, and the civilized world is his oyster, the knife to open which he holds in his hand, if he have the strength to use it. No isolation among barbarous surroundings can sever a man from the life of Europe who keeps his hold on the language and literature. In the heart of Kaffirland to-day you may come across a solitary German trader's hut; the man who inhabits it has been twenty-five years severed from Europe; his material surroundings are little better than those of the barbarians around him; but on the shelf in the corner are a dozen old books, and in the drawer of the table he has a score of last year's reviews and papers. You are astonished by the passionate eagerness with which, as soon as he has lost his shyness, he proceeds to discuss, or rather to pour out his views on the world's greatest problems to you; and when he finds you have just returned from Europe, there is something pathetic in the range and child-like eagerness of his questions:—"What do they think in Europe, of the possibility of war between Russia and England?" "Did you see the new French actor who came out last year?"—whose name you, fresh from Europe have perhaps not even heard. "Is the Queen looking aged?"—and he draws out a little shilling guide to the year before last's picture gallery, and gives you his opinion of the little prints. While you are having your dinner of Kaffir corn or mealies and mutton he discusses the existing relation between France and Germany; and he asks your opinion on some detail connected with the last revolution in South America, of which you are perhaps obliged to confess you know nothing. He has read of it in all his papers. Twenty-five years of separation have not tended necessarily to sever the man from the life of Europe, but have rather sharpened his interest; and it would sometimes seem as though the denizen of some solitary outpost of civilization is apt to take a broader and more impartial view of civilization, as a whole, than he who in some world-centre of civilization, such as London or Paris, is apt to get too much dust in his eyes from the life immediately about him to be able to see far. The solitary white child, who grows up in the mission house on the banks of the Ganges, or the planter's home in the far Indies, may discover with astonishment when at last it finds itself in the heart of that civilization of which it has dreamed and for which it has panted, that from the old book-shelf with its score of volumes read and re-read and long pored over, and from the mail-bag arriving once a month, every scrap of whose news from the great outer world was carefully stored in childish memory and long dwelt on, it had learnt most of what London and Paris had to teach it; that what it had sucked out in its solitude was the true core of civilization; that what was left for it to consume further was principally the shell; for it would not be difficult to mention half-a-dozen books in any literary European language which, read a dozen times and pondered over, would make a man a true denizen of the nineteenth century in all that it holds of value, and enable him to reach the forefront of European life. A bee will make as sweet and as rich honey from one bunch of flowers as though you should give him a whole garden to choose from; its quality and sweetness will depend upon the nature of his own little tube—but you must give him that one bunch.

It is that one bunch that has been denied to the Boer.

For to the young Boer, growing up on an African farm and speaking nothing but the "Taal," this culture in solitude was impossible. If travellers passed, they might be Frenchmen, Germans, or Englishmen, but even their conversation was not comprehensible to him; if they left behind them book or newspaper, he could not decipher it; and the most brilliant effusions of an Amsterdam writer could reach him almost as little as an article in the Figaro or The Times. If his mother turned out of the old wagon-chest volumes brought from Holland or France by her grandmother, they could awaken no curiosity in him; they were not in the speech he used daily. The Dutch of Holland was as little a means of communication between himself and the outer world as the Greek of Plato is to a modern Greek peasant. If his mother taught him his letters, he had small use to make of them; even the great family Bible was in Dutch; and fifty years ago there was not one frontier Boer in thirty who could read or write, though he knew many passages of the Bible by heart and could repeat them with the book open before him.[23] Many could not even do this. If he had found himself in any great city of Holland or France he would not only have found himself alone, but an unintelligent barbarian. The Boer seldom came in contact with even the smart Colonial townsman of Dutch descent but he shrank from him, and crept back to his own people, who understood his speech, with more and more of clinging: they were his humanity, his world; beyond them was nothing.

One is sometimes asked to define exactly what the term "Boer" means. There is only one scientific definition for it; it signifies a South African European by descent whose vernacular is the Taal, and who uses familiarly no literary European language. It does not denote race of necessity; the Boer may be French, Dutch, German, or of any other blood—one of the most widely spread Boer families is Portuguese, and one Scotch in descent—neither does it of any necessity denote occupation; the word "Boer" means literally "farmer," and practically the Boer is often a farmer and stockowner; but he may also be a hunter, trader, the president of a republic, or of any other occupation—he remains a Boer still while the Taal remains his only familiar speech.

That the Boer himself accepts this definition, though without analysis, is clear; he will say of a man who has learned and uses habitually a literary speech, "His father was a Boer, and his brothers are still Boers," implying that he is one no more; and to call a learned judge or brilliant barrister, whatever his descent, a Boer, would be, from the Colonial standpoint, merely absurd. There is an old fairy tale which tells how an enchantress once muttered a spell against a certain city, and raised up about it in a moment an invisible wall, which shut it out from the sight and ken of all passers-by, rendering all beyond its walls invisible to the men and women within, and the city imperceptible to those from without. Such a wall has the Taal raised about the Boer—as long as it remains standing the outer world touches him not, nor he it; with how much of loss or gain who shall say!