The terrible events of the last five years in South Africa have left
us silent. There is undoubtedly a score laid against us on this
matter, Dutch and English South Africans alike; for the moment it is
in abeyance; in fifty or a hundred years it will probably be presented
for payment as other bills are, and the white man of Africa will have
to settle it. It has been run up as heavily north of the Limpopo as
south; and when our sons stand up to settle it, it will be Dutchmen
and Englishmen together who have to pay for the sins of their fathers.
Such is the history of our fellow South Africans of Dutch extraction,
who to-day cover South Africa from Capetown to the Limpopo. In the
Cape Colony, and increasingly in the two Republics, are found enormous
numbers of cultured and polished Dutch-descended South Africans, using
English as their daily form of speech, and in no way distinguishable
from the rest of the nineteenth century Europeans. Our most noted
judges, our most eloquent lawyers, our most skillful physicians, are
frequently men of this blood; the lists of the yearly examinations of
our Cape University are largely filled with Dutch names, and women,
as well as men, rank high in the order of merit. It would sometimes
almost seem as if the long repose the people has had from the heated
life of cities, with the large tax upon the nervous system, had sent
them back to the world of intellectual occupations with more than
the ordinary grasp of power. In many cases they go home to Europe to
study, and doubtless their college life and English friendships bind
Britain close to their hearts as to ours who are English-born. The
present State Attorney of the Transvaal is a man who has taken some of
the highest honors Cambridge can bestow. Besides, there exist still
our old simple farmers or Boers, found in the greatest perfection in
the midland districts of the Colony, in the Transvaal and Free State,
who constitute a large part of the virile backbone of South Africa.
Clinging to their old seventeenth century faiths and manners, and
speaking their African taal, they are yet tending to pass rapidly away,
displaced by their own cultured modern children; but they still form
a large and powerful body. Year by year the lines dividing the South
Africans from their more lately arrived English-descent brothers are