The Great Boer War | Page 3

hundred miles from the edge
of the Karoo to the Valley of the Zambesi. Then came the additional
Huguenot emigrants--the best blood of France three hundred of them, a
handful of the choicest seed thrown in to give a touch of grace and soul
to the solid Teutonic strain. Again and again in the course of history,
with the Normans, the Huguenots, the Emigres, one can see the great
hand dipping into that storehouse and sprinkling the nations with the
same splendid seed. France has not founded other countries, like her
great rival, but she has made every other country the richer by the
mixture with her choicest and best. The Rouxs, Du Toits, Jouberts, Du
Plessis, Villiers, and a score of other French names are among the most
familiar in South Africa.

For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the
gradual spreading of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld
which lay to the north of them. Cattle raising became an industry, but
in a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms are
necessary for even small herds. Six thousand acres was the usual size,
and five pounds a year the rent payable to Government. The diseases
which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and Australia,
been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox cleared the
country for the newcomers. Further and further north they pushed,
founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and
Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale
of the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered
dwellings. Already the settlers were showing that independence of
control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most
prominent characteristic. Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an
older but weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them
to revolt. The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal
cataclysm which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years,
during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between
England and France in the final counting up of the game and paying of
the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in 1814 to the British Empire.
In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the
title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one. We had it
by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of purchase. In 1806
our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and took possession of
Cape Town. In 1814 we paid the large sum of six million pounds to the
Stadholder for the transference of this and some South American land.
It was a bargain which was probably made rapidly and carelessly in
that general redistribution which was going on. As a house of call upon
the way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the country itself
was looked upon as unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or
Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which we were
buying for our six million pounds? The inventory would have been a
mixed one of good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest
diamond mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and
humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we

fought with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace
and prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men. The
future should hold something very good for us in that land, for if we
merely count the past we should be compelled to say that we should
have been stronger, richer, and higher in the world's esteem had our
possessions there never passed beyond the range of the guns of our
men-of-war. But surely the most arduous is the most honourable, and,
looking back from the end of their journey, our descendants may see
that our long record of struggle, with its mixture of disaster and success,
its outpouring of blood and of treasure, has always tended to some
great and enduring goal.
The title-deeds to the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but there is
one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The ocean has
marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined. There is no
word of the 'Hinterland;' for neither the term nor the idea had then been
thought of. Had Great Britain bought those vast regions which
extended beyond the settlements? Or were the discontented Dutch at
liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations to bar the path of the
Anglo-Celtic colonists? In that question lay the germ of all the trouble
to come. An American would