Our officials did not always understand them; they made no allowances
for a race of brave, free men inhabiting a country which by the might
of their own right hand they had won from savages and wild beasts, and
who were given over into the hands of a strange government without
their consent or desire; and the peculiarities which arose from their
wild free life were not always sympathetically understood; even their
little language, the South African “Taal,” a South African growth so
dear to their hearts, and to all those of us who love indigenous and
South African growths, was not sympathetically and gently dealt with.
The men, well meaning, but military, tried with this fierce, gentle,
sensitive, free folk force, where they should have exercised a broad
and comprehensive humanity; and when they did right (as when the
slaves were freed), they did it often in such manner, that it became
practically wrong. A little of that tact of the higher and larger kind,
which springs from a human comprehension of another’s difficulties
and needs, might, exercised in the old days, have saved South
Africa from all white-race problems; it was not, perhaps under the
conditions, could not, be exercised. The people’s hearts ached under
the uncompromising iron rule. In 1815 there was a rising, and it was
put down. As the traveler passes by train along the railway from Port
Elizabeth to Kimberley, he will come, a few miles beyond Cookhouse,
to a gap between two hills; to his right flows the Fish River; to his
left, binding the two hills, is a ridge of land called in South Africa
a “nek.” It is a spot the thoughtful Englishman passes with deep pain.
In the year 1815 here were hanged five South Africans who had taken
part in the rising, and the women who had fought beside them (for the
South African woman has ever stood beside the man in all his labors and
struggles) were compelled to stand by and look on. The crowd of fellow
South Africans who stood by them believed,