CHAPTER VIITHE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BOER

CHAPTER VIITHE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BOERBefore turning to consider the English element in our society, we would linger yet a moment, before we finally leave the Boer, to consider some of the many assertions made with regard to him, and what of truth or falsehood appears to us to lie in them, and, above all, how they have come to be made.It has been said, though it will probably never be said again by any person who knows what courage is, that the Boer is a coward and cannot fight. How, in view of his history during the last two hundred years, this ever came to be said, even by his bitterest foes, has appeared to us always a matter of some astonishment. We can explain it in any way only when we consider the fact that bravery, like every other virtue, may assume more than one shape, and that men accustomed to recognize it under one aspect do not readily recognize it under another. In the animal world, there is the courage of the bull terrier always eager for a conflict, and seeking a fellow combatant for the pleasure of fighting him, and the courage of the mastiff, whom you may even tread on with impunity as he lies sleeping at your foot, but who, should his master or his master's property be attacked, may be more dangerous than any bull terrier; there is the courage of the tigress robbed of her young, who faces fearlessly fire and death to regain it, yet at other times prefers to slink away from man, and there is the courage of the game-cock who chafes angrily against the bars to reach the game-cocks in other cages; andthe courage of the red African mier-kat, who attacked, will try to get to his hole, and, if he cannot, will fight fearlessly to the death.[71]In the human world, there is the same diversity of courage; there is the courage of the woman robbed of her infant, who climbs where no other human foot dare tread and recovers it from the eagle's eyrie, while the crowds below look on with breathless astonishment, and the courage of the peasant woman, who, after being broken three times on the wheel, on being asked to give up the names of her confederates, already almost past speech, shook her head in refusal, is again put on the wheel, and dies. This courage is quite consistent with an extreme distaste for conflict and an extreme sensitiveness to pain, and takes its rise only in natures so constituted that impersonal passions or convictions are capable of obliterating the natural bias, and this form of courage is probably the most indomitable. But there is also the courage, very rare in its way, of the prize-fighter, always showing his biceps and challenging his acquaintances, and to whom life would probably not be worth living without the applause and excitement of the ring; but who, on the other hand, if he knew that the odds were fifteen to one against him, and that there was neither money nor applause to be gained if he won, would probably refuse to fight at all.Now the courage of the old-fashioned Boer tends markedly to resemble the first rather than the last type; and, why this should be so, a study of his history makes clear.In all societies, whether savage or civilized, in which a distinct military organization exists, and in which military success is the path to emolument and power, much meretricious glory hangs about the occupation of the slayer.From the Bornean savage, who until he has a certain number of skulls to hang about his waist may not marryor take share in deliberations of state, and the Zulu who must first wet his spear in human blood to be accounted a full man, on to many of our so-called civilized states, where in pageants and pastimes preference always is given to the man who slays or overthrows over the man who creates or produces, war is continually surrounded with a certain meretricious tinsel which ends by making the thing attractive for its own sake. It is to increase this artificial charm and render war attractive, that the savage hangs cats' tails round his waist, sticks cock-feathers in his hair, and beats on his tom-tom, when he is working himself up for battle, and that the so-called civilized man wears red stripes on his trousers, struts with his chin high in the air and his shoulders well held back and padded, and that he wears feathers, tails, or portions of metal, whatever is believed to make his appearance more striking and important. It is this which makes war and the warrior so attractive to the ignorant youth of both sexes. The soldier, dressed and holding himself as other men, would not be so eagerly sought after by the idle woman of the ball-room, nor would her cook be so anxious to walk about with the private if he walked as other human creatures walk and had the same kind of hat; and the peasant boy who enlists does so, in nine cases out of ten, because of the drums and the marches and the flags. It is not generally really the desire to feel the blood and the brain of a fellow-creature, dismembered by your hand, start out, and still less to lie with one slug in the stomach and another in the lungs, while the blood rises in mouthfuls and there is a rattle in the throat, that tempts the majority of men to become soldiers. It is, in nine cases out of ten, not the desire to kill or be killed, but a hunger for the tinsel with which war is surrounded, that influences men who affect a love for it; it is the hope of fame, metal stars, gilt crosses, the glitter and glare of the parade-ground, and the possibility of title and honours, which make the youth to enlist and maiden to say, "How beautiful is war!"For the African Boer there has never been this meretricious tinsel pasted over the ghastly reality of war.His training for two hundred years has been in a wholly different school. For generation after generation the Boer has gone out with his wife and child into the wilderness, and, whether he wished it or no, the possibility of death for them and for himself, by the violence of beasts or men, has been an ever present reality. Night by night, as he has gone to sleep in his solitary wagon or daub-and-wattle house, he has had his musket within reach of his hand; and his wife hearing a sound in the night has sat up anxiously, whispering, "What is that!" and together they have listened while the children slept. If the Boer went out to hunt lion or buffalo, it was accompanied with no hilarious excitement at the thought of the applause of friends at his success, of pictures in the illustrated magazines, and the newspaper paragraph over the mighty hunter. All it meant was this, that, if he killed the lion, then the cow that gave milk for his children would be safe, and his small son could now go out and herd the lambs without danger. If he brought home a load of springbok or of wildebeest, it meant simply that his wife cut it up into biltong and hung it to dry outside the house for food. If his own right arm failed him, or he kept no sufficient watch and fell by the hands of savages or the jaws of beasts, then it meant that not only he died, but possibly that wife and children died with him; and it might be years before the news of their death travelled down to their kindred if, indeed, it ever reached them. If, single-handed and however bravely, he defended himself and his against odds of the mightiest kind, there was no admiring world before which his success would be blazoned forth. Even were he a commandant, and died at the head of his little body of men ever so heroically, there was no Westminster Abbey and no requiem for him; his comrades buried him where he fell, and a little heap of rough African stones on a wide African plain, with the African wind blowing over him, was all that he had for recompense. If he led his little band to victory, there was no triumphal entry into the city with bunting flying, and bars filled with drunken men, and hoarse mobs shouting incoherently, or delirious women anxious tokiss him, or present him with weapons gilt and jewelled—simply, he went home to his house or wagon, and his old wife kissed him and said she was glad he had come back; and his comrades said, "He is a good fighter," and next time there was war he had to go in front again. If his aim were true and his hand never shook and his courage never failed, then it meant life for himself and all dear to him; if he failed, then it was death; but that was all.In this stern, silent school for generations the Boer has been trained. Courage has become inherent and hereditary with him; he sucks it in with his mother's milk; and, with it, an equally uncompromising antipathy to war and conflict. For generations, deadly strife and conflict, or the possibility of it, was part of the daily unending discipline of his life. He regards it now as one of life's crowning evils, to be avoided if possible—never to be flinched from when inevitable.It is this attitude which has led to so much misunderstanding of the Boer's character by those who do not know him, and even by those who think they know him. His view with regard to the chase illustrates exactly his attitude toward human slaughter. If the leopards or wild dogs decimate his flocks, he will spend days in the most unwearied, skilful, and daring hunting; yet when he has killed them he will often return home, and say with a sigh of relief, "Now it will be six months before I need go after them again." If you inform him that in England at great expense men keep and breed up foxes which, with great damage to crops and hedges, they afterwards spend days in hunting, he will look at you as though doubting the truth of your assertion, remarking quietly: "But the Rednecks must then be mad? What do they want with the wild beasts?"[72]His attitude toward human conflict is exactly the same.We say advisedly, after a long and intimate knowledge of the old-fashioned Boer, that never, in one instance, have we heard man or woman speak of war with joy, desire, or elation. For this folk there is no more glamour or amusement about war than for a nurse who has attended hundreds of cases of small-pox and cancer there is a glamour and glory about these diseases. It is with extreme difficulty that old men and women can be got to describe the conflicts they have lived through in their youth. After speaking a few minutes they will suddenly break off with: "Ah! but war is an awful thing! God grant that you may never see what we have seen, or go through what we have gone through." Not in any single case have we known the old Boer to vaunt himself on any success or act of courage. (With the young fashionable nineteenth-century descendants in towns, who have seen no fighting, it may be different.)Having known intimately for five years an elderly man, and having always noticed certain marks on his face, we inquired one day the cause, and were surprised to learn that he had been an actor in some most heroic scenes; having in one instance gone up a mountain alone to fetch down the wounded, and that he bore on his body at least ten scars, gained in different conflicts. Neither by this man nor by any of his family, whom we had known intimately for years, had the fact been mentioned. "Yes," said a close female relative quietly, when we questioned her on the matter, "he is a man who can fight; he isnot afraid"; and that was all. She regarded his action in the same light as a ploughman's wife might regard her husband's power to plough twenty acres in a given time and who would show no lofty pride in stating it—it was "all in the day's work." The old-fashioned Boer never speaks of war without becoming solemn and reverential, and, metaphorically speaking, taking off his hat. "Man fights; but victory is of God."[73]It is this solemn, reverent, almost shy, manner of speaking of conflict, which misleads the ignorant stranger. In conversation several years ago with a man newly from Europe, we dwelt on what we believed to be the superb fighting and staying power of the African Boer. "How is that possible," said the newcomer, "when every individual Boer you meet is an arrant coward?" And he proceeded to illustrate his assertion by stating that a short time before in conversation with three young Boers, all greatly his superiors in size, he had offered to fight all of them in succession to show which was the better man, an Englishman or a Dutchman. They declined the contest, and one of them, smiling sheepishly, walked up to him and asked him to take a cup of coffee. "They funked it! They funked!" cried the newcomer. "They dared not stand up to me, and I was the smallest of the four!" It was not easy to explain to the Public School man that while he was regarding the Boer as an arrant coward, the Boer was regarding him, good-naturedly, as a fool! The Boer looked upon the offer, without any cause of quarrel, to break each other's skulls much as a horny-handed ploughman, the son of six generations of ploughmen, would regard an offer to plough six acres of land in which nothing was to be planted, simply in order to see who could plough the fastest. "He talks too much; he cannot fight," was probably the comment of the Boers after he had left them, andpossibly each man merely misunderstood the other. The Englishman might have fought well, in spite of all his talk, and the Boer in spite of his silence. It is the difference in mental attitude, doubtless, which has misled the ignorant newcomer, and often the old inhabitant of the country who is not gifted with the power of reading human nature beneath its surface, into holding the view that the Boer is not a fighter. The truth is, the African Boer, devoid as he is of all passion for conflict, regarding war as part of the stern and unavoidable evil of life, to be quietly faced, but never sought, will, if his people, his land, or his freedom, are attacked, go forth to meet war with the same grim unbending resolution with which his forefathers went out to found their homes in the desert. As long as the African Boer remains the African Boer, whenever these things are touched, he will be found among his plains and on his kopjes ready to die, the silent, bravest child of our broad veld.It has been said of the Boer that he is conservative; that he follows line by line the manners and traditions of his fathers; that that which has been sacred to his forebears is sacred to him; that he is immobile, and does not change. This is in part true; in part, untrue.It is true that the primitive Boer has preserved in the South African wilds the ideals and manners of his ancestors of two centuries ago; that in him the seventeenth and even remnants of the sixteenth century are found surviving as among few peoples in Europe; but, if this survival of the past be taken to imply an organic incapacity on his part to adapt himself to change, if it be taken to imply the immobility of a weak and therefore unadaptable nature, which has not the vitality and strength to change, it is wholly untrue. Nothing so indicates the dogged, and almost fierce, strength of the South African Boer as this unique conservatism. Placed in a new environment, removed from all the centres of European culture and thought, thrown out into the African deserts, surrounded by the most crudely primitive conditions of life, and often by none but savage human creatures, nothingwould have been easier, or would have seemed more inevitable, than that rapid change should at once have set itself up in the African Boer; nothing more difficult, and almost impossible, than that he should maintain that degree of cultivation and civilization which he had brought from Europe and already possessed. Again and again, under like conditions, men of lofty European races have been modified wholly. Thrown amid new and savage surroundings, when, after a few generations of isolation from European life, they again come into contact with us, we find that whatever of culture or knowledge they brought with them has vanished; their religion has atrophied; their habits of life have become modified, and, often inter-blending with the savage races about them, they have lost all, or almost all, the old distinctive European marks. They are a new human modification, but a modification often lower in the scale of life than even the savage peoples by whom they were surrounded, a degenerate and decayed people. On the east and west coast of Africa, in South America and elsewhere, again and again this has happened. Europeans, not having the conserving strength to retain what they possessed, and not being able to emulate the primitive virtues of the savage, have gone back in the scale of being. With the South African Boer this has not been so.After two hundred years we find him to-day with that little flag of seventeenth-century civilization which he took with him into the wilderness two hundred years ago, still to-day gallantly flying over his head, untorn and hardly faded after its two centuries' sojourn in the African desert. With the instinct of a powerful race the Boer saw or rather felt his danger. The traditions, the faiths, the manners of his fathers, these he would hold fast by. To move, to be modified in any way by the conditions about him, was to go backwards; he would not move; so he planted his foot and stood still.You say that he still wears the little short jacket of his great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather? Yes, and had he given that up, it would have been to wear none at all! So, line by line, his wife made it, carefully ashis father's forefather's had been. You say he stuck generation after generation to the straight-backed elbow chair and the hard-backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes—and had he given them up, it could have been to adopt nothing more æsthetic; it would have been to sit on the floor; so he held solemnly to the old elbow-chair and the straight-backed sofa, almost as a matter of faith.You say that he had only one book, and clung to that with a passion that was almost idolatry? Yes—but had he given up that one book, it could not have been to fill a library with the world's literature; it would have been to have no literature at all! That one book, which he painfully spelled through and so mightily treasured, was his only link with the world's great stream of thought, morals, and knowledge. That compilation of the history, poetry, and philosophy of the great Semitic people was his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual and intellectual life of the human race. In that he clung to it so passionately, worshipped it so determinedly, he showed his intense hankering after something other than the mere material aspects of life. He was not a man with a thousand avenues open before him toward thought and spiritual and intellectual knowledge, who wilfully shut his eyes to them, saying, "I will see none but this one": he had no other to see. If the Boer had forsaken his Bible we should have found him to-day a savage, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it.To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence of his to the past. That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer woman's elbow-chair, "My children, never forget you are white men! Do always as you have seen your father and mother do!" was no cry of a weak conservatism, fearful of change; it was the embodiment of the passionate determination of a powerful little people, not to lose itself in the barbarism about it, and so sink in the scale of being. To laugh at the conservatism of the Boer is to laugh at a man who, floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercelywith one hand to the only outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it by so much as one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp.That the conservatism of the Boer has in it nothing of the nature of mental ossification, and that he has preserved his pliability intact, is shown by the peculiar facility with which, when the time comes, the Boer leaps in one generation from the rear of the seventeenth-century thought and action to the forefront of the nineteenth.The descendant of generations of old seventeenth-century Boers returns from his studies in Europe an enthusiast over all the latest inventions, an advocate of new ideas and an upholder of the newest fashions. In colonial life, it is a matter of common remark, none are more attracted to the new and the modern than the nineteenth-century educated Dutch, whether man or woman. It would almost seem as though that very dogged strength of character, which for ages has made him capable of retaining his hold upon the old, when the necessity for doing so passes, makes him equally resolute to grasp the new.It has been said of the African Boer that he used his old flintlock gun for a generation after Europe had discarded it. That was true; but had he discarded it, it could only have been to adopt the assegai of the Kaffir. The day he was shown the Mauser, he recognized it and grasped it, and he has used it—not without effect!In very truth, if one should speak frankly of what one most fears for the African Boer, it is a too rapid renunciation of his past, and an acceptance of the new without a sufficient and close examination. Were it possible that our words should reach him, fain would we apostrophise our old-world Boer and his wife thus:—"Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet!"[74]Be not too ready to give up the past, we pray you. All that is new is not true, and that which comes later is not always an improvement on that which went before. We English have an old saying that if youkeep your grandmother's wedding-dress sixty years, times will have come round and it will be in the fashion again. For the world goes round, O Oom and Tante!—unwilling as some of you may still be to believe it!—and that which was new becomes old, and that which was old becomes new again! Do not be too anxious to change your old customs, your simple modes of life, your deep faiths, till you know what you are exchanging them for: the world goes round; and the day may come when you, South Africa, and the world will have need of that which you now are so willing to throw away."Oom and Tante, I will whisper to you a secret! Here, in the very heart of this great material civilization of ours which swells itself so bravely and makes so much noise—here, in the heart of it, there are some of us men and women who are beginning to have our doubts of it; we are beginning to find it out. We may not be very many now, but we shall be more by and by; and we are beginning to question what all this vast accumulation of material goods in certain hands, this enormous increase in the complexity of the material conditions of life, necessarily leads to?"We ask ourselves this:—Though we increase endlessly the complexity of our material possessions and our desires, does the human creature who desires and possesses necessarily expand with them? And the answer which comes back to us when we deeply consider this question is: No."There are times, when, looking carefully at this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, it appears to us much like that concretion which certain deep-sea creatures build up about themselves out of the sand and rubbish on the deep-sea floor, which after a time becomes hard and solid, and forms their grave. It appears to us that under this vast accumulation of material things, this ceaseless thirst for more and more complex material conditions of life, the human spirit and even the human body are being crushed; that the living creature is building up about itself a tomb, in which it will finally dwindle and die."We vary endlessly the nature and shape of the garments we wear; but the bodies for which they exist do not grow more powerful or agile; we multiply endlessly the complexity of our foods; but our digestions grow no stronger to deal with them; we build our houses larger and larger, but the span of life for inhabiting them grows no longer: the Bedouin of the Desert inhabits his tent as long: our cities grow vaster and vaster, but our enjoyment of life in them becomes no more intense: our states expand, but the vitality of their component parts rises no higher: we rush from end to end of the earth with the speed of lightning, but we love it no better than men who lived in their valley and went no further than their feet would carry them: we put the whole world under contribution to supply our physical needs, but the breath of life is no sweeter to us than to our forefathers whom the products of one land could satisfy."For the life of the human creature is but a very little cup in relation to the material goods of life; like the bell of a flower which can hold only one drop of dew, all which you pour in after that can only crush and drown it; it cannot contain it."You know, O Tante and Oom, that in South Africa your beasts suffer sometimes from a disease, of which the leading feature is that, while the creature eats more and more, it grows thinner and thinner. By and by it dies, and when you cut it open you find fastened upon its vitals a parasite, which consumed all its strength, which was never satisfied."Tante and Oom, it is a disease like unto this which eats deep at the heart of our civilization. It is no new disease; nations and persons have died of it before: the plains and riversides on this planet of ours are studded with the mounds beneath which are buried the remains of societies which once suffered from this disease. Some call it degeneration; some decadence; some over-civilization; some excess of luxury; some forgetfulness of God; it matters not what you call it: though the external symptoms may vary, internally it remains always the same."The horse-leech of our material civilization, in which endless wealth and material luxury is thrown into the hands of one section of the community at the cost of others, has three daughters which cry ever: 'Give! Give! Give!' They are fastened on to the very vitals of our modern life, and they cry never—'It is enough.'"Fixed upon us as individuals, we hunger for more houses, more clothes, more furniture, more jewels, more shares, more dividends, whether we can use what we already have or not; and we hunger and strive after these things with as much passionate avidity as the savage after the hare, which if he nets will save him from death by starvation."Fixed on us as nations we cry, 'More lands, more trade, more fruits of the labour of other men in other lands, higher dividends drawn from foreign countries; more—though our national skin should crack, and we burst and die of it at last—more!—more expansion!'"Oom and Tante, we beg of you, if you must partake of our nineteenth-century civilization with us, examine it carefully, and see what it is you are taking in. It is a brightly coloured flower, but at its centre sits a little gilded worm: if you must eat of it, eat the flower, but spew out carefully the worm, which spells death if once it fastens and breeds inside of you."There are certain things indeed, good and fair, which have got embedded in this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, O Oom and Tante, like diamonds in a mud stream: which are in it, but necessarily not of it."In the two centuries which have passed since you left Europe, certain things became common property which you know little of, and which are wholly good and fair; but we beg of you to understand they are not the outcome of that which comes to you with so much blare and glitter as 'nineteenth-century civilization'—the civilization of the bar, the stock exchange, the gambling saloon, the racecourse, gorgeous furniture, and ceaseless changing fashions; nor even of the railway train and the national debt. Do not think, we pray you, when you have grasped with both hands at the mud of our civilization,that you have therefore grasped the gems that may here and there be imbedded in it."There is music which you have not yet heard—Beethoven's; and there is Mozart's, as sweet as the twitter of the birds when you wake up in your wagon in the early dawn and hear them in the bushes round you in the veld, and as gracious as the sound of the raindrops falling on your roof after a long drought; but do not dream that the man who made it had any relation with the speculators whose loud talk overpowers you with its smartness, or the gorgeously dressed women who make you ashamed of your old black skirt. Believe me, it was made by a man leading a life poor and simple as yours, and who lies in a nameless grave; in poverty and loneliness the music came to him, and he made mankind for ever richer by it; and you can hear it as well in fustian and serge, on a wooden seat as from the king's box, with a band of diamonds above your forehead."We have also what you have not yet seen, a Moses, cut in stone. When you look at it you are conscious of strength and joy such as you have when you look up at one of our flat-topped African mountains, with the krantzes on its head, casting a deep blue shadow in the early morning;—it is well to look at it; but do not believe that all the millionaires of all the states on earth if they pooled their wealth could ordain that one line of that great figure should have been created: it was shaped by a man who, seeking after beauty and truth, found his God: a man who so lived with his creation that for weeks together he forgot to remove his boots, so that when he did so the skin came off with them: the fine gentlemen of the boulevards and the parks who talk of their superiority to you because they 'possess art' (meaning that they have made money enough out of other men's labour to buy the works of dead great men) would hardly have cared to walk down the street with him; his rough, strong face would have befitted better a Boer laager than a circle of modern fashion."There are books, O Oom and Tante, other than the one great book which you took into the wildernesswith you; books which so widen the soul of the man who makes them his that he might, when dying, well thank the power behind life that he had been made man, and lived to read them: but, do not believe that they are the products of any trade demand, or have any relation with the wealth and luxury of the modern world. Rich men may buy them and bind them in vellum, and put them in their libraries; but that gives them no hold upon them. In simplicity, and often in solitude and in poverty, the great souls of earth have secreted that immortal honey of thought on which the soul of humanity feeds. And whether it be the wisdom of the great Greek who lay in the Agora in his coarse mantle, instructing without pay the youth of Athens; or the vision of the Puritan Englishman which visited him in poverty, blindness, and old age; or the immortal dream of the Italian exile; or the deathless trill, sweeter than the song of his nightingales, of the young English apothecary who died in Rome; or the philosophy of the great German who lived for thirty years in a little house in the little street of a little German town, desiring no more; or the human cry from the heart of the Scotch ploughman; or the sweet musings of the modern American who communed with his God at Concord for many years—there is no message of beauty or wisdom which it has been given to the soul of men to propound for its fellows, for which luxury or material complexity of life were necessary. There is no message of wisdom which has ever been uttered which you may not as well absorb, seated on the kopje behind your square mud-house, as in the velvet armchair of a duke's palace, with lackeys waiting your commands and the spoils of the universe gathered round you. Two narrow shelves of dingily-bound books will contain more of the world's true intellectual pabulum than a man has time in sixty years to absorb and make his own; and he who at the door of his hut in the veld has spelt out the book of Job and the chants of Isaiah, till he knows them by heart, may have a firmer hold on the world's loftiest literature than if he had hired a librarian to tend his ten thousand costly volumes. Let no man deceive you,O Oom and Tante, nor make you believe that literature is a grand thing, only to be enjoyed by men eating several courses at dinner and dwelling in capacious houses, nor that it can only be produced by men who have consumed thousands of pounds of the world's labour. The world's literature has been produced in simplicity and in poverty, and often in suffering; and that which was good enough for the men who wrote, is good enough for the men who would absorb it. They lie, Tante, they lie, Oom, who tell you that literature is dependant on luxury, or the material complexity of life, for its existence, or is in any way related to it. It is from the barren heath, not from the drawing-room carpet, however many coloured, that the wild bee extracts its honey."Even that knowledge of the conditions of existence which governs the relation of matter with matter, and which yields what is called scientific knowledge, and in a manner seems to mark what is called modern civilization, has yet no causative relation with the greater part of its material phenomena. It does not depend in any way upon the enormous amount of material luxury and wealth concentrated in a few hands which marks our material civilization. It was the Chaldean shepherd watching his flocks at night under a sky as clear and white-studded with stars as that which bends over the Karroo, who first noted the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies. It was the chemist labouring amid the painful fumes of his laboratory with hands as stained by contact with matter as are your sons' to-day when they come in from shearing who first discovered those combinations of atom with the atom, and the reactions of substance on substance, which are letting us slowly a little way into the secret of nature's workshop. It is the mathematician, oblivious of all externals, pondering year after year in his dingy study, with his outlandish garb, who masters at last those laws of relation, the knowledge of which gives to man half his mastery over matter. It is not even the man with the padded shoulders and gilt ornaments upon his dress, who boasts so loudly to you of the superiority of his nineteenth-century weapons of death, who ever madeone of them, or even understands how they were made: nor does he always know how to use them! It is not the gaudily dressed man or woman who travels in the first-class compartment of an express train, and looks with wondering contempt at the slow-rolling old ox-wagon which your grandfathers made, who ever made or comprehends one crank or one piston in all that wonderful creation of human labour and thought in which they are luxuriously borne along; or who could invent or shape even the round solid wheel of a primitive donkey-cart. These wondrous material objects have been the outcome of the work of the labouring brains of the ages, and of the toil of hard-handed mechanics more roughly clothed and simply fed than you who have toiled beneath the earth, and in the fetid workshops, that those things might be. Our little long-tailed African monkey of the bush, if he should see one of his captured brothers, gorgeously arrayed and dancing on a barrel-organ, might well think what a wonderful brain his brother must have, and how much superior to himself he must be in mechanical skill to have made all these things. But in truth we know he made neither the clothes he wears, nor the organ: nor can he even turn the handle; he only dances to the music another makes. It is the little wild monkey out in the woods who has to find food for himself, to know which nuts to eat and where to find them, and who can choose his own pool to drink and dabble his hands in, who has to exercise brain and arm. It is not the jackdaw with the peacock's feathers tied on to his tail, who flaunts them round so overpoweringly, on whom they ever grew."Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante; it is not the men and women revelling in a surfeit of the material products of the labour of others, and scorning you because you have them not, who ever made the very material civilization they boast of. It is not the people scorning your little simple work and life, who could do even that which you can do. It is not the woman lolling back in her double-springed carriage who has the knowledge or invention or perseverance to originate or manufacture one of all those endless materials which cling about her;it was the Hindoo with a cotton cloth about his loins toiling at his loom for twopence a day who made the diaphanous muslin she wears; and the loom on which it was woven and the thread of which it is made were invented by his swarthy-skinned ancestors generations ago. The fairy frill upon her petticoat was sewn on by a needle-girl between snatches of weak tea and bread and butter and fits of coughing. It is not the general, gorgeous in gold lace and trappings, who could make even the jacket he wears; the fine steel dust from the sword at his side cost the life of the man who made it; it is the general's to sport, nothing more. It is out of the labour of hands grimed and hard as yours, and the toils of brains more weary thanyourshave ever been, that this material civilization is built up. If you accept it for you and yours, know what it is you are accepting.Do not mistake the cat that laps the milk for the cow that gave it.When you open a wild bees' nest and find inside a Death's-head moth, you are never fool enough to believe it had anything to do with the making of the honey: you know it is there to feed and—destroy. O Oom, O Tante, do not mistake the Death's-head moths of our civilization for the makers of its honey, or for the honey itself."Art, literature, science, the mastery over material conditions, whatsoever there is in this nineteenth-century civilization that strengthens the arm, or widens the heart, and broadens the intellect, and makes fuller the joy of life—extract it and make it yours."In our nineteenth-century civilization there is a little kernel of things rare and good and great, that have come down to us through the centuries, and that brave souls of labour have added their little quota of matter to even in our day. If you must crack the nut of our nineteenth-century civilization, we pray of you eat only this little kernel and throw away the great painted shell. For God's sake, do not try to eat the shell and throw away the kernel."You know, O my Oom and Tante, that, when the Jew smouses go round the country selling their goods, they sometimes sell to you clocks that glitter like gold;and you give for them your best sheep and oxen. But, when you take them to be tested by the town jeweller, you find they are not gold, but tin, gilt with brass; and they will not go."There is much, O Oom and Tante, in our civilization that is like to the Jew smous's clock! We warn you, be careful how you exchange your good old African wares for our modern merchandise. There is much brummagem about."For, believe us, Oom and Tante, there are some of us who have travelled the world round; we have seen and handled this thing, called nineteenth-century civilization. We have lived in vast cities, a few unconsidered streets in which contain as many souls as your whole land. We have seen half their population labouring continually without sunlight or fresh air, and, by a labour that knows no end, producing material things they never touch. We have seen white-faced children, who shall be the thinking, labouring, fighting men and women when we shall be in our graves, suck their white crusts dipped in tea, and look up at us with famished eyes: we have seen old men, after a long life of toil with no fireside to sit by, creep into the cold shadow of the workhouse, to die there. And we have seen also other sides of nineteenth-century civilization. We have been in the houses that are palaces, which all the world labours to make full and fair; we have pierced to their centres, and found there fair women surrounded by all earth yields, wearing silks which the Indian made for twopence a day, with which he bought a handful of rice and melted butter to keep him alive, and laces bending over which human eyes grew dim, and beside them in delicate cups stood tea whichTamilwomen near their hour of labour may have plucked with quivering fingers; and they have sat up on their sofas and looked at us with weary eyes, and asked, 'Is life worth living?' We have watched the fevered faces of men in the world's great stock exchanges, till pity seized us, and we could have cried: 'Is there no antifebrile that will slow this pulse and give these souls rest and peace?' We have stood at Monte Carlo, and seenprince and millionaire throw down coin as though it were not the life-blood of the peoples. We have seen lock-hospitals and the men and women that are in them, and also those who fill it but never come there; we have seen the parade, where human slaughter hides the dirt and ugliness of its trade behind plumes and gilt: we have seen the ballroom and the regal procession. We have seen, on the other hand, what is fair and beautiful in art and wonderful in science; we have seen brave and rare spirits, even amid the rush and dross of our civilization, walking peacefully on their own lofty little path, absorbing little, and imparting much. Yet, believe us, that in the still night we lie awake, and all that we have seen rises up as in a picture before us,—from Ratcliffe Highway with its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes and prostitutes; from the Champs Elysées to the Karoo; from Grosvenor Square to Bethnal Green,—there yet rises up no picture of life more healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the whole nature of man on earth, than yours in the wide plains of South Africa. We know all its deficiencies, its lack of a certain variety, the absence of certain brilliant elements which the human spirit may feed on elsewhere; and, yet, it rises up before us as something wholly strong, and virile, and full of promise. There are even times when we have felt we would rather be the little naked Kaffir children who play, fat and shining, with the kids on your kraal walls in the African sunshine than be most of the modern men and women we have known; for the life is more than meat and the body than raiment."Hold fast, Tante! Hold fast, Oom! You have much to lose. Be careful how you exchange it. Cling to your old manners, your old faiths, your free, strong lives, till you know what you are bartering them for."Tante, dear Tante, be not too anxious to change your old, straight, black skirt for the never-ceasing vagaries of modern fashion, that sap at the life of the modern woman as an open running tumour saps at the strength of a body. Do not be too anxious to change, for a pile of gauze or straw and textile flowers, that old black kappieof yours, that has shielded you for so many generations from the African sun and the African winds, in peace and in war, on kopje and on plain."Believe me, if some great artist should see you as you sit there by your out-spanned wagon, in your old black dress with your infant at your breast, and the African sky above you and the still veld round you, and should paint you as you are, you would hang in the world's great galleries, and generations to come of men and women would say, 'How strong, how harmonious!' For your old black dress, and the veld and the sky, and the baby at your bosom can never go out of fashion, as the hoop, and the patch, and the tilted hat, and fashionable furniture, go; for they have that eternal dew of the morning upon them which rests on all things growing up out of nature and necessity, for use and not for show. And if it should have happened that, in the sterner moments of your life, one should have depicted you truly when, in laager or beside wagon, you stood side by side with the man who was your companion, to defend that you prized, then, believe me, that old black kapje of yours would have become a helm, and men in future generations, looking on, would say 'There were giants in those days.'"Tante, we, the newest of new women, stretch out our hands to you, the oldest of the old, in the African veld: and we pray of you, stay where you are, and hold fast by what you have, till we come and meet you. We are coming to you in our own way. Stay where you are till we can join hands. In your life of fellow-labour with man, in your social productiveness and activity, you have realized much of that which we are seeking. Do not force your great, free, labouring-woman's foot into the gegawed shoes of the parasite female, from which we are striving to withdraw ours; do not compel yourself to accept those insignia of degeneracy, whether in clothing or bearing, from which we to-day are so passionately striving to free ourselves. Hold by your simple brave life a little longer, produce your many children, guide your household, share man's burden with him, peace or war, till in a new social condition you pass without enervationor degeneration to new labours, and to a companionship with man in new and intellectual fields of toil. Do not, we beg of you, believe that, when you wear a French bonnet and have an eighteen-inch waist or trip to tennis in patent shoes, you have come any nearer to grasping the good, the true, or the beautiful that may be embedded in our nineteenth-century civilization. Feel no shame, we pray you, for that strong capacious form of yours; from that strong untrammelled body of yours shall yet spring a race strong to do or dare, such as grows not beneath the waistband of an enervated parasitic womanhood."Tante, wait for us, we are coming; you have something to teach us, we have something to teach you; and it may be that when we have met and joined hands we will work out something fairer and better for our people and the world than has often been. Only do not decay from your ancient simplicity of living and toiling before the time is ripe and you can move forward to new labours. It would have been better that you should have fallen in your early conflicts with savages and beasts, and that nothing were left of you now but a name and a heap of stones on the African plains, than that you should absorb the diseases of an enervated and voluptuous modern womanhood—for then you would only have died and not rotted."Oom Piet, we pray of you, be not anxious to adopt the fashions of the nineteenth-century gentlemen of the club and front stalls in the theatre. Be not too ready to discard your velschoens and your moleskin trousers and your short jackets. In these things your fathers did gallant deeds and loved freedom. Any coat that a brave man wears is fashion enough: and the world comes to recognize that in the end. Cling to your independence; and the day will come when your old round felt hat will hang on the walls of the African houses of the future as Oliver Cromwell's ancient hat hangs to-day in an English mansion; and men of the future generations will say, looking at it reverently: 'Such wore our fathers in the days when they did great things!'"Do not think too lightly of your own knowledge;nor dream that the man who knows well the path to the brothel and the bar, and knows how to bear and bull the share-market, or who gains in one night's play as much as your farm yields you in a year, has any advantage over you. It is better to know how to find your way without a guide over hills and plains of your native land, and to be able to sleep well out under the stars with your head on a saddle, and when necessary to die for freedom on your kopjes, than to know all the paths of the modern city. Hold by your past; and the day will yet come when, instead of following the fashion, you will set it."South Africa has still need of her old African lion and lioness. Hold on a while longer; let your past die hard!"Is it a wholly unrealizable dream, that, if you could but cling for a while longer to your own simple healthful forms of life and gold-untouched ideals, you might make it possible for us in South Africa to attain to a fairer and more healthful form of civilization than has elsewhere been reached? Is it wholly unrealizable that you might help us to escape in their worse forms the diseases of modern life, and attain to its good: while eschewing its evil? That we might arrive at that condition of simple living and high thinking, under which alone the spirit and body of man attain their full development, and continual progress is possible? Or must you, too, fall before the molten calf, and worship it?"Does it seem strange to you, O Oom and Tante, that we sometimes think of you as an antidote? That in the heart of this nineteenth-century civilization we remember you sometimes, with your simple, free, strong lives, as a man living in some torrid valley, where all around him were fever-smitten, might remember a hardy mountain plant which he had seen growing on the hill-tops in his youth, and cry: 'Ah, could they but eat of it they might yet be saved!'"Therefore we ask of you,notto accept too readily all that the men of this generation offer you, nor to be dazed by the glitter of our wares; but to select slowly and carefully, if you must select at all."For this nineteenth century is not the last century; nor is its civilization the last civilization; nor its ideals the last ideals! The twentieth is coming! And before it ends, it may be that this nineteenth will seem strangely distant! Men may then look over its mental wares as, after twenty years, one might look over a box containing the clothes of a dead elder sister, saying: 'This bit of real lace is still good, and that silk scarf; but the rest is all brummagem and long out of date.'"For we, to-day, O Oom and Tante, with our new-found mechanical inventions, and our accumulations of material goods, are like little children who have just been given a rattle, and who spring it, till it deafens themselves and every one else besides, and can hear nothing else. We are like little long-tailed monkeys, who having found a bag of sugar think that there is now nothing left in life but to sit round it and eat it till they die."We are like to the children of Israel, when they built themselves the golden calf and then danced about it, saying: 'Thou art the Lord our God, and there is none like unto thee! From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, and thy years shall have no end!'—till a Moses, it may be, shall come, and smite it into powder: and of that powder, mingled with the waters of life, shall all the nations that worshipped drink, and they shall call it Marah. And then it may be that they will seek for a new God."We say it, well knowing the soft burst of laughter which will arise now to-day, when the door is not yet closed on the nineteenth century, and its ideals are yet dominating the men and women of the age—that the time may come when even men of the world, those who live in the present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognize that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of the community and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease—that the time will come when men will profess it in order to be called sane; that the railway-train which brings the prostitute,the stock exchange, and the foes to the freedom of a people, into the heart of its land, had better for humanity have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains; and had it taken two million years to come, so much better for the nation and the world; that the value of a species of conveyance whether for men or goods depends entirely to mankind on the nature of what it brings; that even that Ark of the Covenant of the nineteenth century—a new railway run by a joint stock company—is worthy of adoration, or is not, entirely by the increased strength of body, width of sympathy, clearness of intellect and joy in life it tends to confer on the folks among whom it runs; that a submarine cable used to whisper lies from land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to urge on the powerful to attack the weak, is the devil's own tube and has a connection direct with Hell; that a daily paper, not based on an earnest determination to disseminate truth, is a cup of poison, sent round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the people; that the man who from his place in the national assembly rises and states the increase in his nation's imports and exports as though he were describing its entire weal or woe, without consideration of the human suffering and degradation or joy and good it may have cost to produce them, or without calculation of the benefit or disease to be caused by their consumption—is a fool; that it is more disgrace to a land to have in it one hungry, work-crushed soul than to have no millionaire; when it shall be recognized that the greatest nation is not that which numbers most bodies, but most fully-grown free spirits, and fewest crushed and broken; that an empire over human flesh and lands, and not hearts, is an empire of disease; that a central power which cannot propel the blood of sympathy and a common fellowship to the remotest member of its group is on the path to cardiac failure and a sudden death."We know that thus to speak is to enter into the Holy of Holies of the nineteenth century, and therein to blaspheme. Nevertheless, O Oom and Tante, it is possible that the day is coming when the stock exchangeand the share market, in which the men of this generation worship the Lord their God, may pass away as the gladiatorial shows of the Roman Empire and the rule of the Inquisition, so mighty and overpowering in their days, have passed: it may be that a new Telemachus will yet leap down into the arena where men traffic with the life-blood of the nations, and, torn to pieces by the howling crowd, it will yet be said by future generations, 'From that day there were held no more share markets after the old fashion!'"For this nineteenth century is not the last century! Nor are its institutions the last institutions! Nor is its God the last God!"Therefore, seeing that these things are so, O Oom and Tante, and that we know not what part of our nineteenth-century wares shall be consumed up as stubble, be cautious how you traffic with us. Do not barter your old seventeenth-century wares, poor and simple as they may be, for that which you may have to part with again the next day. The twentieth century is coming: and it may be that, before it has reached its close, it may be found nearer the seventeenth than the nineteenth."Remember the Jew smous's clock!There be many Jew smouses going up and down in this civilization of ours; and they deal in other things besides clocks. They will traffic with you for your land, your freedom, your independence, your very souls—for they hold that 'every man has his price!'—and they will give you in exchange that which will not wear—a gilt-lined robe, which, soon as you wear it, will eat the flesh of freedom from off your bones and lick up the blood of liberty within your veins. Therefore, beware how you deal with them! That little which you have, hold fast till you see what shall come to pass."The last Belshazzar's feast has not been held! Be careful that, when the finger appears writing on the wall, you be not found also sitting at that table."Hold fast a little while longer, we pray of you, by your old ideals, your old manners, your simple old-world life. We—South Africa—the world, have need of you!"So, were it possible that our words should reach him, we would fain apostrophize our old-world Boer and his wife. For our fear indeed is, not that he will exhibit any incapacity for accepting nineteenth-century ideals, but that he may swallow them too readily; and that South Africa, whose backbone he forms, may also suffer from that curvature of the spine, brought on by an excessive addiction to luxury and an ill-distribution of wealth, from which certain other peoples are dying.To the other indictments which have been made, by those who have not understood him, against the Boer, it would seem hardly worth now referring, yet before we finally turn from him we may glance at them.It has been said that he is priest-ridden.It is undoubtedly true that the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church held in the past, and still to a limited extent hold to-day, a unique position among their people as compared with the mass of modern clergy.We in the heart of the nineteenth-century civilization regard, and most rightly, with an almost unqualified scorn the modern man or woman who submits to priestly dictation. Where the priest has no means of gaining information, experience of life, or abstruse knowledge not shared by other members of his society, submission to his dicta or dependence on his advice can spring only from two causes—an intellectual feebleness, which prevents the use of the man's reason, or a moral cowardice, which causes him to shrink facing the responsibility of dealing with the moral and spiritual problems of life, and renders him desirous of having them dealt with vicariously.But it has not always been so. In the middle ages, when war and the struggle with crude material conditions of life occupied almost the entire bulk of the population, the clergy, as the one class exempt from these labours, and therefore leisured and with facilities for travel or abstraction in study, were of necessity much more than clergy. They absorbed in themselves several now wholly distinct social functions. Their monasteries were the repositoriesof learning; they themselves were the guardians of national tradition, law, and history; their knowledge of plants and leisure to study disease made them the healers of the folk; experiments and improvements in agriculture were made in their grounds; born of the people, they were naturally their political as well as moral and intellectual guides, and it was to them that the oppressed people turned everywhere for advice and leadership. In such a social condition, every individual born with unusual intellectual aptitudes or inclinations was almost inevitably bound to gravitate towards the Church; and the priesthood therefore were, not merely through training and position, but by a species of natural selection, the intellectual leaders of the folk. Therefore, for some centuries the inclination towards culture and progress in a monarch, a nation, or an individual might be measured, strange as it now seems, by their esteem of and devotion towards the clergy. It was under the influence of the clergy that those Gothic churches rose which are the glory and incarnation of their age; and it was round the monastery and the church that the intellectual and socialized life of the people centred. Incidentally, it happened that those who were the ghostly guides of the people were also at the same time the leaders of the people in learning and the upholders of their human rights.On a minute scale, and under very different conditions, the clergy of the Dutch churches have for nearly two centuries fulfilled the same complex functions towards their people in South Africa. They have, it is true, been the sacerdotal consolers and guides of their folk; but they have been infinitely more. They have been the representatives of that higher learning and culture which circumstances denied to the mass of their people; the parsonage and the church have been the social points round which the national life centred, and from which have radiated whatever of culture and social organization was attainable.It has often been scornfully described how when, in some remote Boer farmhouse, one son showed unusual mental alertness, he was predestined for the Church; howoften, by rigid economy on the part of other members of the family, the money was accumulated to send him to college in Europe, and how on his return Mynheer was regarded with profound reverence and almost awe, even by his aged parents and the boys with whom he had minded lambs in childhood. This is true; but to suppose the feeling took its rise merely in a superstitious reverence for the black coat and ghostly prerogatives of the preacher would be to err profoundly. The man who returned from his studies differed materially, in the extent of his information and in his grasp on many aspects of life, from his brothers and companions who had remained tending the paternal flocks, or labouring in the family vineyards; and he had therefore necessarily certain social functions to perform, which could be performed by no other members of his community, and this apart entirely from his priestly office. The feelings with which he was regarded combined, with relation to one person, the feeling which the modern man entertains for his skilled lawyer, his family physician, his favourite writer, and his political leader. For years the clergy of the Dutch Church formed of necessity the connecting link between the Boer, widely scattered through remote districts, and the outer world. They were his advisers, often his representatives when he entered into contact with keen social and political elements of the hungry modern world. It was largely through them that such conditions of culture and knowledge as he had brought with him into the desert were maintained and enlarged; and they formed the channels through which were conveyed to him whatever influence of the modern world reached him. And nobly, on the whole, have they performed their task.We believe that no one who is aware of our attitude towards sacerdotalism generally, to dogmatic theology everywhere, will accuse us of any undue bias in favour of the Dutch Reformed clergy on account of their function or abstract theological views, when we say that not only the Boer but South Africa generally is under debt to them.Undoubtedly there must have been cases of self-seekingand self-assertion; and a certain narrowness is perhaps inherent inallforms of sacerdotal rule; but, viewed as a whole, their influence must be pronounced as having been beneficial, and this far beyond the ordinary mean. They have striven manfully to introduce both in education and social life much of what was healthiest and most vitalizing in our modern civilization, and to exclude much of that which was lowest and most sordid; and with singleness of purpose, with but few exceptions from the days when Erasmus Smit followed the fortunes of the early fore-trekkers and his aged wife harangued the British Commissioner at Maritzburg, they have stood faithfully by and headed their people in all times of oppression and need.The time is very rapidly approaching when the unique relation between the Dutch pastor and his flock will finally have ceased. For the last twenty years the intellect of the Boer race has rapidly been finding openings for itself; the bar, the side-bar, the medical profession, the professor's chair, administrative and political life are absorbing the brilliant youths. The time is very rapidly approaching when the minister will differ from his flocks only in the fact that he has gone through a course of dogmatic theology, and when he will be equalled or excelled in general culture and knowledge of life by the large mass of his congregation; and, with this change, he will take his place side by side with other clergy, whose usefulness is confined to the performance of their ghostly functions; and, with this change also, the Church will cease, save in exceptional cases, to draw the best intellects of the people, as it has done in the past. But we believe that in the future no impartial survey will be possible of the history of South Africa during the last two hundred years without it being perceived how large is the debt which, not the Boer alone, but South Africa generally, owes to the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Churches.Not only does it imply a curious miscomprehension to state that the rule of the clergy has been autocratic and oppressive, but it has been his Church which has formed for the Boer his most valuable exercise groundin Republican Government, and his relations to it and to his clergy exemplify markedly his curious inborn gift for self-government. Not only have his pastors been men of the people, rising up from among them and from no selected class, and imposed on him by no authority from without; but in every case each particular congregation selects its own leader, and frees itself of him when proved undesirable. The submission with which, in a still largely oligarchically governed country like England, a single individual is allowed to select, by his own autocratic will, son, brother, or dependant, and place him in control of a church and parish with all its inhabitants for a lifetime, is a condition unintelligible to the free South Africa Boer, and one he would not tolerate for an hour.On the other hand, while he would not tolerate, and still less submit to, or respect, or regard as valid, any authority imposed on him from without, having once for himself selected an individual in whom he reposes full confidence, he is peculiarly willing, not merely to support and follow him, but to submit to his administration of the law, provided it is a law which he has at first agreed to recognize; and this is equally true whether the case be that of a pastor, field-cornet, commandant, or the president of a state. It is this inborn peculiarity which yields to the Boer his remarkable aptitude for Republican Government, and prevents him from being amenable to any other form of rule.It is often objected, when one questions the wisdom of that unwritten law which ordains that, in the English Army, out of an empire of countless millions, all its officers should yet practically be selected from a comparatively small knot of wealthy families known as Society, and that such a process must hopelessly cripple thearmy; that the English nature is so addicted to oligarchic rule that the bulk of men born in England could never be made to respect, follow, or submit to, one of themselves; that the fact that a man was born in their street, shared the conditions of their daily life, and belonged to their own class, would cause them to look down upon and despisehim. Whether this be true of the English or not, with the Boers exactly the reverse is the case. It is precisely the man of the people, growing up among them, sharing their life and social condition, whom, when he has won their confidence and they have selected him to his post, they are willing to follow and support with a whole-heartedness seldom accorded to rulers or leaders of men.[75]They submit to the man because they regard him as the incarnation of their own will.It is further often said, when one animadverts on the fact that members, connections, or, worse still, dependants of those small circles of families forming the administrative oligarchy in England, are almost always sent out as Governors to the Colonies of Canada and Australia and New Zealand, that the English-speaking people of these countries would not respect men chosen by themselves, and that no successful form of government would be possible were not foreigners sent them. Whether this would be the case in Canada or Australia we have not had personal means of judging, but in South Africa the very reverse is true. Were a prince of the Guelph family or a Duke's son sent out, though loaded with wealth and oligarchic honours, he would never have one half of the influence over or submission from the majority of South Africans that a man born among them, growing up among them, and selected by themselves, would readily obtain. "He is our man, who knows us and whom we know; we have chosen him, therefore we will follow him!"It is the complete failure to understand this ineradicable instinct on the part of the African Boer which has caused so many of those who have attempted to interfere in South African affairs so grievously to fail. With a race in which this instinct is so inborn that it manifests itselfin all the relations of life, towards pastor, magistrate, and general; with an individual instinct for not obeying any person to whom it has not first consciously and deliberately delegated its authority; and then an instinct for following and supporting that person,—the South African nation, in which the Boer element predominates, is bound ultimately to become free, self-governing, independent, and republican.It has been said of the Boer that he is bigoted and intolerant in religious matters. That this accusation should ever have been made has always appeared to us a matter of astonishment. It can only have been made by those who either know little or nothing of the true up-country Boer, or who confuse intolerance with the totally distinct attitude of a peculiar steadfastness to your own forms of faith. When we remember that it is not much over a century since the last execution for abstract opinion took place in Europe; when we recall the fact that within the memory of those still comparatively young, in the most enlightened community (or that which so considers itself), a man cultured, able, and public-spirited, was excluded from the performance of his legislative duties, imprisoned, and befouled by the Press and the nation on account of his view with regard to the nature of a first cause; when we mark that, in the same community, it was only the other day that Christians holding one form of shibboleth were with difficulty, and after fierce struggles, brought to admit brother Christians using another closely-allied shibboleth to any participation in public life or honours; when we consider the fact that to-day a Roman Catholic or a Jew is still in England excluded from the highest offices of State on the ground of his abstract views, and is on that ground regarded with scorn and disgust by the large mass of his fellow-countrymen; when we recall the fact that it is not twenty years since a book speculating on the abstract grounds of religion was refused at the bookstalls of the United Kingdom, and publicly destroyed in several cases; when we note the contemptible and grotesque riots which to-day occurin the heart of our most modern cities over the cut of a cassock or the burning of a pitiful pot of scent; when the gift of a work of art representing a mother and child to a board school is sufficient to rend an Anglo-Saxon community with fierce and brutal passions; when these things are considered, it is surely unintelligible that a charge of religious intolerance should be made against the South African Boer. With every excuse for an exceptional intolerance, a large portion of his ancestors having come to South Africa to escape religious persecution in Europe, he yet compares favourably with other nations in this respect, and the burnings of Quakers and witches which disgraced even New England have never been known in Africa. No man has ever suffered death for his religious views on these shores.Firmly wedded to his own faith and not readily allowing any interference with his own attitude, he is yet singularly willing to abstain from interference with the abstract views of others. With regard to the up-country Boer of the present day, we are personally exceptionally qualified to pass an impartial judgment, having through life held views on theological matters not shared by the bulk of the societies about us; and we can unqualifiedly assert that it is not in the true primitive Boer farmhouse that an inquisitorial intolerance, or the desire to suppress the right of the individual soul to its own convictions, will ever make itself felt. There is far more bigotry and inquisitorial interference with the right of free thought in the English parsonage and the nineteenth-century drawing-room than in the primitive up-country Boer farmhouse. Wherever bigotry and intolerance make their appearance among the Boers, they will always be found to take their rise among the more cultured nineteenth-century part of the population. Many years ago a Boer woman once inquired of us how it was we never went to any church. We replied that our religion was not at all the same as hers, and that according to our view it was not necessary to go to church. She asked us whether we could explain to her what our religion was like. We replied that we could not, each man's religion was hisown concern: and she dropped the matter, nor referred to it again till nearly two years later, when she said: "You told me once that your religion differed from mine; but the more I know you the more I begin to think we must have the same religion. When I sit alone with my sewing I think very far away sometimes; and sometimes it occurs to me like this: If I had many children, and each one spoke a different language, I would try to talk to each child in the language it understood; it would be always me speaking, but in a different language to each child. So, sometimes I think, it is the same God speaking, only He speaks to you and to me in different languages."When it is remembered that this remark was made by an unlettered Boer woman, who could neither read nor write, I think it will be allowed that the learned, philosophic, modern thinker may sometimes not have much to teach "the ignorant Boer" with regard to the true basis of philosophic religious toleration.The third indictment which is made against the Boer with regard to religion is that he is superstitious, that he allows his religion to dominate every concern in his life, instead of confining it to that small sphere in which alone in modern life conformably with respectability its influence is allowed.It may be at once stated that, in a certain sense, the statement that the African Boer is dominated by his religion is true, but in how far this indictment is one from which he suffers will vary with the standpoint of the individual considering it. We, in this latest phase of the nineteenth-century civilization, are so habituated to seeing men and women walking about, carrying with them wholly dead or more or less moribund religions which, like decaying flesh, corrupt the atmosphere, and render putrid the whole environment of those who bear it, that large numbers of us have reached a point at which we are unable to conceive of religion as anything but dead, a thing to be restricted within the narrowest possible limits, if life is to remain livable.

Before turning to consider the English element in our society, we would linger yet a moment, before we finally leave the Boer, to consider some of the many assertions made with regard to him, and what of truth or falsehood appears to us to lie in them, and, above all, how they have come to be made.

It has been said, though it will probably never be said again by any person who knows what courage is, that the Boer is a coward and cannot fight. How, in view of his history during the last two hundred years, this ever came to be said, even by his bitterest foes, has appeared to us always a matter of some astonishment. We can explain it in any way only when we consider the fact that bravery, like every other virtue, may assume more than one shape, and that men accustomed to recognize it under one aspect do not readily recognize it under another. In the animal world, there is the courage of the bull terrier always eager for a conflict, and seeking a fellow combatant for the pleasure of fighting him, and the courage of the mastiff, whom you may even tread on with impunity as he lies sleeping at your foot, but who, should his master or his master's property be attacked, may be more dangerous than any bull terrier; there is the courage of the tigress robbed of her young, who faces fearlessly fire and death to regain it, yet at other times prefers to slink away from man, and there is the courage of the game-cock who chafes angrily against the bars to reach the game-cocks in other cages; andthe courage of the red African mier-kat, who attacked, will try to get to his hole, and, if he cannot, will fight fearlessly to the death.[71]

In the human world, there is the same diversity of courage; there is the courage of the woman robbed of her infant, who climbs where no other human foot dare tread and recovers it from the eagle's eyrie, while the crowds below look on with breathless astonishment, and the courage of the peasant woman, who, after being broken three times on the wheel, on being asked to give up the names of her confederates, already almost past speech, shook her head in refusal, is again put on the wheel, and dies. This courage is quite consistent with an extreme distaste for conflict and an extreme sensitiveness to pain, and takes its rise only in natures so constituted that impersonal passions or convictions are capable of obliterating the natural bias, and this form of courage is probably the most indomitable. But there is also the courage, very rare in its way, of the prize-fighter, always showing his biceps and challenging his acquaintances, and to whom life would probably not be worth living without the applause and excitement of the ring; but who, on the other hand, if he knew that the odds were fifteen to one against him, and that there was neither money nor applause to be gained if he won, would probably refuse to fight at all.

Now the courage of the old-fashioned Boer tends markedly to resemble the first rather than the last type; and, why this should be so, a study of his history makes clear.

In all societies, whether savage or civilized, in which a distinct military organization exists, and in which military success is the path to emolument and power, much meretricious glory hangs about the occupation of the slayer.

From the Bornean savage, who until he has a certain number of skulls to hang about his waist may not marryor take share in deliberations of state, and the Zulu who must first wet his spear in human blood to be accounted a full man, on to many of our so-called civilized states, where in pageants and pastimes preference always is given to the man who slays or overthrows over the man who creates or produces, war is continually surrounded with a certain meretricious tinsel which ends by making the thing attractive for its own sake. It is to increase this artificial charm and render war attractive, that the savage hangs cats' tails round his waist, sticks cock-feathers in his hair, and beats on his tom-tom, when he is working himself up for battle, and that the so-called civilized man wears red stripes on his trousers, struts with his chin high in the air and his shoulders well held back and padded, and that he wears feathers, tails, or portions of metal, whatever is believed to make his appearance more striking and important. It is this which makes war and the warrior so attractive to the ignorant youth of both sexes. The soldier, dressed and holding himself as other men, would not be so eagerly sought after by the idle woman of the ball-room, nor would her cook be so anxious to walk about with the private if he walked as other human creatures walk and had the same kind of hat; and the peasant boy who enlists does so, in nine cases out of ten, because of the drums and the marches and the flags. It is not generally really the desire to feel the blood and the brain of a fellow-creature, dismembered by your hand, start out, and still less to lie with one slug in the stomach and another in the lungs, while the blood rises in mouthfuls and there is a rattle in the throat, that tempts the majority of men to become soldiers. It is, in nine cases out of ten, not the desire to kill or be killed, but a hunger for the tinsel with which war is surrounded, that influences men who affect a love for it; it is the hope of fame, metal stars, gilt crosses, the glitter and glare of the parade-ground, and the possibility of title and honours, which make the youth to enlist and maiden to say, "How beautiful is war!"

For the African Boer there has never been this meretricious tinsel pasted over the ghastly reality of war.His training for two hundred years has been in a wholly different school. For generation after generation the Boer has gone out with his wife and child into the wilderness, and, whether he wished it or no, the possibility of death for them and for himself, by the violence of beasts or men, has been an ever present reality. Night by night, as he has gone to sleep in his solitary wagon or daub-and-wattle house, he has had his musket within reach of his hand; and his wife hearing a sound in the night has sat up anxiously, whispering, "What is that!" and together they have listened while the children slept. If the Boer went out to hunt lion or buffalo, it was accompanied with no hilarious excitement at the thought of the applause of friends at his success, of pictures in the illustrated magazines, and the newspaper paragraph over the mighty hunter. All it meant was this, that, if he killed the lion, then the cow that gave milk for his children would be safe, and his small son could now go out and herd the lambs without danger. If he brought home a load of springbok or of wildebeest, it meant simply that his wife cut it up into biltong and hung it to dry outside the house for food. If his own right arm failed him, or he kept no sufficient watch and fell by the hands of savages or the jaws of beasts, then it meant that not only he died, but possibly that wife and children died with him; and it might be years before the news of their death travelled down to their kindred if, indeed, it ever reached them. If, single-handed and however bravely, he defended himself and his against odds of the mightiest kind, there was no admiring world before which his success would be blazoned forth. Even were he a commandant, and died at the head of his little body of men ever so heroically, there was no Westminster Abbey and no requiem for him; his comrades buried him where he fell, and a little heap of rough African stones on a wide African plain, with the African wind blowing over him, was all that he had for recompense. If he led his little band to victory, there was no triumphal entry into the city with bunting flying, and bars filled with drunken men, and hoarse mobs shouting incoherently, or delirious women anxious tokiss him, or present him with weapons gilt and jewelled—simply, he went home to his house or wagon, and his old wife kissed him and said she was glad he had come back; and his comrades said, "He is a good fighter," and next time there was war he had to go in front again. If his aim were true and his hand never shook and his courage never failed, then it meant life for himself and all dear to him; if he failed, then it was death; but that was all.

In this stern, silent school for generations the Boer has been trained. Courage has become inherent and hereditary with him; he sucks it in with his mother's milk; and, with it, an equally uncompromising antipathy to war and conflict. For generations, deadly strife and conflict, or the possibility of it, was part of the daily unending discipline of his life. He regards it now as one of life's crowning evils, to be avoided if possible—never to be flinched from when inevitable.

It is this attitude which has led to so much misunderstanding of the Boer's character by those who do not know him, and even by those who think they know him. His view with regard to the chase illustrates exactly his attitude toward human slaughter. If the leopards or wild dogs decimate his flocks, he will spend days in the most unwearied, skilful, and daring hunting; yet when he has killed them he will often return home, and say with a sigh of relief, "Now it will be six months before I need go after them again." If you inform him that in England at great expense men keep and breed up foxes which, with great damage to crops and hedges, they afterwards spend days in hunting, he will look at you as though doubting the truth of your assertion, remarking quietly: "But the Rednecks must then be mad? What do they want with the wild beasts?"[72]

His attitude toward human conflict is exactly the same.

We say advisedly, after a long and intimate knowledge of the old-fashioned Boer, that never, in one instance, have we heard man or woman speak of war with joy, desire, or elation. For this folk there is no more glamour or amusement about war than for a nurse who has attended hundreds of cases of small-pox and cancer there is a glamour and glory about these diseases. It is with extreme difficulty that old men and women can be got to describe the conflicts they have lived through in their youth. After speaking a few minutes they will suddenly break off with: "Ah! but war is an awful thing! God grant that you may never see what we have seen, or go through what we have gone through." Not in any single case have we known the old Boer to vaunt himself on any success or act of courage. (With the young fashionable nineteenth-century descendants in towns, who have seen no fighting, it may be different.)

Having known intimately for five years an elderly man, and having always noticed certain marks on his face, we inquired one day the cause, and were surprised to learn that he had been an actor in some most heroic scenes; having in one instance gone up a mountain alone to fetch down the wounded, and that he bore on his body at least ten scars, gained in different conflicts. Neither by this man nor by any of his family, whom we had known intimately for years, had the fact been mentioned. "Yes," said a close female relative quietly, when we questioned her on the matter, "he is a man who can fight; he isnot afraid"; and that was all. She regarded his action in the same light as a ploughman's wife might regard her husband's power to plough twenty acres in a given time and who would show no lofty pride in stating it—it was "all in the day's work." The old-fashioned Boer never speaks of war without becoming solemn and reverential, and, metaphorically speaking, taking off his hat. "Man fights; but victory is of God."[73]

It is this solemn, reverent, almost shy, manner of speaking of conflict, which misleads the ignorant stranger. In conversation several years ago with a man newly from Europe, we dwelt on what we believed to be the superb fighting and staying power of the African Boer. "How is that possible," said the newcomer, "when every individual Boer you meet is an arrant coward?" And he proceeded to illustrate his assertion by stating that a short time before in conversation with three young Boers, all greatly his superiors in size, he had offered to fight all of them in succession to show which was the better man, an Englishman or a Dutchman. They declined the contest, and one of them, smiling sheepishly, walked up to him and asked him to take a cup of coffee. "They funked it! They funked!" cried the newcomer. "They dared not stand up to me, and I was the smallest of the four!" It was not easy to explain to the Public School man that while he was regarding the Boer as an arrant coward, the Boer was regarding him, good-naturedly, as a fool! The Boer looked upon the offer, without any cause of quarrel, to break each other's skulls much as a horny-handed ploughman, the son of six generations of ploughmen, would regard an offer to plough six acres of land in which nothing was to be planted, simply in order to see who could plough the fastest. "He talks too much; he cannot fight," was probably the comment of the Boers after he had left them, andpossibly each man merely misunderstood the other. The Englishman might have fought well, in spite of all his talk, and the Boer in spite of his silence. It is the difference in mental attitude, doubtless, which has misled the ignorant newcomer, and often the old inhabitant of the country who is not gifted with the power of reading human nature beneath its surface, into holding the view that the Boer is not a fighter. The truth is, the African Boer, devoid as he is of all passion for conflict, regarding war as part of the stern and unavoidable evil of life, to be quietly faced, but never sought, will, if his people, his land, or his freedom, are attacked, go forth to meet war with the same grim unbending resolution with which his forefathers went out to found their homes in the desert. As long as the African Boer remains the African Boer, whenever these things are touched, he will be found among his plains and on his kopjes ready to die, the silent, bravest child of our broad veld.

It has been said of the Boer that he is conservative; that he follows line by line the manners and traditions of his fathers; that that which has been sacred to his forebears is sacred to him; that he is immobile, and does not change. This is in part true; in part, untrue.

It is true that the primitive Boer has preserved in the South African wilds the ideals and manners of his ancestors of two centuries ago; that in him the seventeenth and even remnants of the sixteenth century are found surviving as among few peoples in Europe; but, if this survival of the past be taken to imply an organic incapacity on his part to adapt himself to change, if it be taken to imply the immobility of a weak and therefore unadaptable nature, which has not the vitality and strength to change, it is wholly untrue. Nothing so indicates the dogged, and almost fierce, strength of the South African Boer as this unique conservatism. Placed in a new environment, removed from all the centres of European culture and thought, thrown out into the African deserts, surrounded by the most crudely primitive conditions of life, and often by none but savage human creatures, nothingwould have been easier, or would have seemed more inevitable, than that rapid change should at once have set itself up in the African Boer; nothing more difficult, and almost impossible, than that he should maintain that degree of cultivation and civilization which he had brought from Europe and already possessed. Again and again, under like conditions, men of lofty European races have been modified wholly. Thrown amid new and savage surroundings, when, after a few generations of isolation from European life, they again come into contact with us, we find that whatever of culture or knowledge they brought with them has vanished; their religion has atrophied; their habits of life have become modified, and, often inter-blending with the savage races about them, they have lost all, or almost all, the old distinctive European marks. They are a new human modification, but a modification often lower in the scale of life than even the savage peoples by whom they were surrounded, a degenerate and decayed people. On the east and west coast of Africa, in South America and elsewhere, again and again this has happened. Europeans, not having the conserving strength to retain what they possessed, and not being able to emulate the primitive virtues of the savage, have gone back in the scale of being. With the South African Boer this has not been so.

After two hundred years we find him to-day with that little flag of seventeenth-century civilization which he took with him into the wilderness two hundred years ago, still to-day gallantly flying over his head, untorn and hardly faded after its two centuries' sojourn in the African desert. With the instinct of a powerful race the Boer saw or rather felt his danger. The traditions, the faiths, the manners of his fathers, these he would hold fast by. To move, to be modified in any way by the conditions about him, was to go backwards; he would not move; so he planted his foot and stood still.

You say that he still wears the little short jacket of his great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather? Yes, and had he given that up, it would have been to wear none at all! So, line by line, his wife made it, carefully ashis father's forefather's had been. You say he stuck generation after generation to the straight-backed elbow chair and the hard-backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes—and had he given them up, it could have been to adopt nothing more æsthetic; it would have been to sit on the floor; so he held solemnly to the old elbow-chair and the straight-backed sofa, almost as a matter of faith.

You say that he had only one book, and clung to that with a passion that was almost idolatry? Yes—but had he given up that one book, it could not have been to fill a library with the world's literature; it would have been to have no literature at all! That one book, which he painfully spelled through and so mightily treasured, was his only link with the world's great stream of thought, morals, and knowledge. That compilation of the history, poetry, and philosophy of the great Semitic people was his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual and intellectual life of the human race. In that he clung to it so passionately, worshipped it so determinedly, he showed his intense hankering after something other than the mere material aspects of life. He was not a man with a thousand avenues open before him toward thought and spiritual and intellectual knowledge, who wilfully shut his eyes to them, saying, "I will see none but this one": he had no other to see. If the Boer had forsaken his Bible we should have found him to-day a savage, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it.

To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence of his to the past. That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer woman's elbow-chair, "My children, never forget you are white men! Do always as you have seen your father and mother do!" was no cry of a weak conservatism, fearful of change; it was the embodiment of the passionate determination of a powerful little people, not to lose itself in the barbarism about it, and so sink in the scale of being. To laugh at the conservatism of the Boer is to laugh at a man who, floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercelywith one hand to the only outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it by so much as one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp.

That the conservatism of the Boer has in it nothing of the nature of mental ossification, and that he has preserved his pliability intact, is shown by the peculiar facility with which, when the time comes, the Boer leaps in one generation from the rear of the seventeenth-century thought and action to the forefront of the nineteenth.

The descendant of generations of old seventeenth-century Boers returns from his studies in Europe an enthusiast over all the latest inventions, an advocate of new ideas and an upholder of the newest fashions. In colonial life, it is a matter of common remark, none are more attracted to the new and the modern than the nineteenth-century educated Dutch, whether man or woman. It would almost seem as though that very dogged strength of character, which for ages has made him capable of retaining his hold upon the old, when the necessity for doing so passes, makes him equally resolute to grasp the new.

It has been said of the African Boer that he used his old flintlock gun for a generation after Europe had discarded it. That was true; but had he discarded it, it could only have been to adopt the assegai of the Kaffir. The day he was shown the Mauser, he recognized it and grasped it, and he has used it—not without effect!

In very truth, if one should speak frankly of what one most fears for the African Boer, it is a too rapid renunciation of his past, and an acceptance of the new without a sufficient and close examination. Were it possible that our words should reach him, fain would we apostrophise our old-world Boer and his wife thus:—"Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet!"[74]Be not too ready to give up the past, we pray you. All that is new is not true, and that which comes later is not always an improvement on that which went before. We English have an old saying that if youkeep your grandmother's wedding-dress sixty years, times will have come round and it will be in the fashion again. For the world goes round, O Oom and Tante!—unwilling as some of you may still be to believe it!—and that which was new becomes old, and that which was old becomes new again! Do not be too anxious to change your old customs, your simple modes of life, your deep faiths, till you know what you are exchanging them for: the world goes round; and the day may come when you, South Africa, and the world will have need of that which you now are so willing to throw away.

"Oom and Tante, I will whisper to you a secret! Here, in the very heart of this great material civilization of ours which swells itself so bravely and makes so much noise—here, in the heart of it, there are some of us men and women who are beginning to have our doubts of it; we are beginning to find it out. We may not be very many now, but we shall be more by and by; and we are beginning to question what all this vast accumulation of material goods in certain hands, this enormous increase in the complexity of the material conditions of life, necessarily leads to?

"We ask ourselves this:—Though we increase endlessly the complexity of our material possessions and our desires, does the human creature who desires and possesses necessarily expand with them? And the answer which comes back to us when we deeply consider this question is: No.

"There are times, when, looking carefully at this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, it appears to us much like that concretion which certain deep-sea creatures build up about themselves out of the sand and rubbish on the deep-sea floor, which after a time becomes hard and solid, and forms their grave. It appears to us that under this vast accumulation of material things, this ceaseless thirst for more and more complex material conditions of life, the human spirit and even the human body are being crushed; that the living creature is building up about itself a tomb, in which it will finally dwindle and die.

"We vary endlessly the nature and shape of the garments we wear; but the bodies for which they exist do not grow more powerful or agile; we multiply endlessly the complexity of our foods; but our digestions grow no stronger to deal with them; we build our houses larger and larger, but the span of life for inhabiting them grows no longer: the Bedouin of the Desert inhabits his tent as long: our cities grow vaster and vaster, but our enjoyment of life in them becomes no more intense: our states expand, but the vitality of their component parts rises no higher: we rush from end to end of the earth with the speed of lightning, but we love it no better than men who lived in their valley and went no further than their feet would carry them: we put the whole world under contribution to supply our physical needs, but the breath of life is no sweeter to us than to our forefathers whom the products of one land could satisfy.

"For the life of the human creature is but a very little cup in relation to the material goods of life; like the bell of a flower which can hold only one drop of dew, all which you pour in after that can only crush and drown it; it cannot contain it.

"You know, O Tante and Oom, that in South Africa your beasts suffer sometimes from a disease, of which the leading feature is that, while the creature eats more and more, it grows thinner and thinner. By and by it dies, and when you cut it open you find fastened upon its vitals a parasite, which consumed all its strength, which was never satisfied.

"Tante and Oom, it is a disease like unto this which eats deep at the heart of our civilization. It is no new disease; nations and persons have died of it before: the plains and riversides on this planet of ours are studded with the mounds beneath which are buried the remains of societies which once suffered from this disease. Some call it degeneration; some decadence; some over-civilization; some excess of luxury; some forgetfulness of God; it matters not what you call it: though the external symptoms may vary, internally it remains always the same.

"The horse-leech of our material civilization, in which endless wealth and material luxury is thrown into the hands of one section of the community at the cost of others, has three daughters which cry ever: 'Give! Give! Give!' They are fastened on to the very vitals of our modern life, and they cry never—'It is enough.'

"Fixed upon us as individuals, we hunger for more houses, more clothes, more furniture, more jewels, more shares, more dividends, whether we can use what we already have or not; and we hunger and strive after these things with as much passionate avidity as the savage after the hare, which if he nets will save him from death by starvation.

"Fixed on us as nations we cry, 'More lands, more trade, more fruits of the labour of other men in other lands, higher dividends drawn from foreign countries; more—though our national skin should crack, and we burst and die of it at last—more!—more expansion!'

"Oom and Tante, we beg of you, if you must partake of our nineteenth-century civilization with us, examine it carefully, and see what it is you are taking in. It is a brightly coloured flower, but at its centre sits a little gilded worm: if you must eat of it, eat the flower, but spew out carefully the worm, which spells death if once it fastens and breeds inside of you.

"There are certain things indeed, good and fair, which have got embedded in this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, O Oom and Tante, like diamonds in a mud stream: which are in it, but necessarily not of it.

"In the two centuries which have passed since you left Europe, certain things became common property which you know little of, and which are wholly good and fair; but we beg of you to understand they are not the outcome of that which comes to you with so much blare and glitter as 'nineteenth-century civilization'—the civilization of the bar, the stock exchange, the gambling saloon, the racecourse, gorgeous furniture, and ceaseless changing fashions; nor even of the railway train and the national debt. Do not think, we pray you, when you have grasped with both hands at the mud of our civilization,that you have therefore grasped the gems that may here and there be imbedded in it.

"There is music which you have not yet heard—Beethoven's; and there is Mozart's, as sweet as the twitter of the birds when you wake up in your wagon in the early dawn and hear them in the bushes round you in the veld, and as gracious as the sound of the raindrops falling on your roof after a long drought; but do not dream that the man who made it had any relation with the speculators whose loud talk overpowers you with its smartness, or the gorgeously dressed women who make you ashamed of your old black skirt. Believe me, it was made by a man leading a life poor and simple as yours, and who lies in a nameless grave; in poverty and loneliness the music came to him, and he made mankind for ever richer by it; and you can hear it as well in fustian and serge, on a wooden seat as from the king's box, with a band of diamonds above your forehead.

"We have also what you have not yet seen, a Moses, cut in stone. When you look at it you are conscious of strength and joy such as you have when you look up at one of our flat-topped African mountains, with the krantzes on its head, casting a deep blue shadow in the early morning;—it is well to look at it; but do not believe that all the millionaires of all the states on earth if they pooled their wealth could ordain that one line of that great figure should have been created: it was shaped by a man who, seeking after beauty and truth, found his God: a man who so lived with his creation that for weeks together he forgot to remove his boots, so that when he did so the skin came off with them: the fine gentlemen of the boulevards and the parks who talk of their superiority to you because they 'possess art' (meaning that they have made money enough out of other men's labour to buy the works of dead great men) would hardly have cared to walk down the street with him; his rough, strong face would have befitted better a Boer laager than a circle of modern fashion.

"There are books, O Oom and Tante, other than the one great book which you took into the wildernesswith you; books which so widen the soul of the man who makes them his that he might, when dying, well thank the power behind life that he had been made man, and lived to read them: but, do not believe that they are the products of any trade demand, or have any relation with the wealth and luxury of the modern world. Rich men may buy them and bind them in vellum, and put them in their libraries; but that gives them no hold upon them. In simplicity, and often in solitude and in poverty, the great souls of earth have secreted that immortal honey of thought on which the soul of humanity feeds. And whether it be the wisdom of the great Greek who lay in the Agora in his coarse mantle, instructing without pay the youth of Athens; or the vision of the Puritan Englishman which visited him in poverty, blindness, and old age; or the immortal dream of the Italian exile; or the deathless trill, sweeter than the song of his nightingales, of the young English apothecary who died in Rome; or the philosophy of the great German who lived for thirty years in a little house in the little street of a little German town, desiring no more; or the human cry from the heart of the Scotch ploughman; or the sweet musings of the modern American who communed with his God at Concord for many years—there is no message of beauty or wisdom which it has been given to the soul of men to propound for its fellows, for which luxury or material complexity of life were necessary. There is no message of wisdom which has ever been uttered which you may not as well absorb, seated on the kopje behind your square mud-house, as in the velvet armchair of a duke's palace, with lackeys waiting your commands and the spoils of the universe gathered round you. Two narrow shelves of dingily-bound books will contain more of the world's true intellectual pabulum than a man has time in sixty years to absorb and make his own; and he who at the door of his hut in the veld has spelt out the book of Job and the chants of Isaiah, till he knows them by heart, may have a firmer hold on the world's loftiest literature than if he had hired a librarian to tend his ten thousand costly volumes. Let no man deceive you,O Oom and Tante, nor make you believe that literature is a grand thing, only to be enjoyed by men eating several courses at dinner and dwelling in capacious houses, nor that it can only be produced by men who have consumed thousands of pounds of the world's labour. The world's literature has been produced in simplicity and in poverty, and often in suffering; and that which was good enough for the men who wrote, is good enough for the men who would absorb it. They lie, Tante, they lie, Oom, who tell you that literature is dependant on luxury, or the material complexity of life, for its existence, or is in any way related to it. It is from the barren heath, not from the drawing-room carpet, however many coloured, that the wild bee extracts its honey.

"Even that knowledge of the conditions of existence which governs the relation of matter with matter, and which yields what is called scientific knowledge, and in a manner seems to mark what is called modern civilization, has yet no causative relation with the greater part of its material phenomena. It does not depend in any way upon the enormous amount of material luxury and wealth concentrated in a few hands which marks our material civilization. It was the Chaldean shepherd watching his flocks at night under a sky as clear and white-studded with stars as that which bends over the Karroo, who first noted the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies. It was the chemist labouring amid the painful fumes of his laboratory with hands as stained by contact with matter as are your sons' to-day when they come in from shearing who first discovered those combinations of atom with the atom, and the reactions of substance on substance, which are letting us slowly a little way into the secret of nature's workshop. It is the mathematician, oblivious of all externals, pondering year after year in his dingy study, with his outlandish garb, who masters at last those laws of relation, the knowledge of which gives to man half his mastery over matter. It is not even the man with the padded shoulders and gilt ornaments upon his dress, who boasts so loudly to you of the superiority of his nineteenth-century weapons of death, who ever madeone of them, or even understands how they were made: nor does he always know how to use them! It is not the gaudily dressed man or woman who travels in the first-class compartment of an express train, and looks with wondering contempt at the slow-rolling old ox-wagon which your grandfathers made, who ever made or comprehends one crank or one piston in all that wonderful creation of human labour and thought in which they are luxuriously borne along; or who could invent or shape even the round solid wheel of a primitive donkey-cart. These wondrous material objects have been the outcome of the work of the labouring brains of the ages, and of the toil of hard-handed mechanics more roughly clothed and simply fed than you who have toiled beneath the earth, and in the fetid workshops, that those things might be. Our little long-tailed African monkey of the bush, if he should see one of his captured brothers, gorgeously arrayed and dancing on a barrel-organ, might well think what a wonderful brain his brother must have, and how much superior to himself he must be in mechanical skill to have made all these things. But in truth we know he made neither the clothes he wears, nor the organ: nor can he even turn the handle; he only dances to the music another makes. It is the little wild monkey out in the woods who has to find food for himself, to know which nuts to eat and where to find them, and who can choose his own pool to drink and dabble his hands in, who has to exercise brain and arm. It is not the jackdaw with the peacock's feathers tied on to his tail, who flaunts them round so overpoweringly, on whom they ever grew.

"Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante; it is not the men and women revelling in a surfeit of the material products of the labour of others, and scorning you because you have them not, who ever made the very material civilization they boast of. It is not the people scorning your little simple work and life, who could do even that which you can do. It is not the woman lolling back in her double-springed carriage who has the knowledge or invention or perseverance to originate or manufacture one of all those endless materials which cling about her;it was the Hindoo with a cotton cloth about his loins toiling at his loom for twopence a day who made the diaphanous muslin she wears; and the loom on which it was woven and the thread of which it is made were invented by his swarthy-skinned ancestors generations ago. The fairy frill upon her petticoat was sewn on by a needle-girl between snatches of weak tea and bread and butter and fits of coughing. It is not the general, gorgeous in gold lace and trappings, who could make even the jacket he wears; the fine steel dust from the sword at his side cost the life of the man who made it; it is the general's to sport, nothing more. It is out of the labour of hands grimed and hard as yours, and the toils of brains more weary thanyourshave ever been, that this material civilization is built up. If you accept it for you and yours, know what it is you are accepting.Do not mistake the cat that laps the milk for the cow that gave it.When you open a wild bees' nest and find inside a Death's-head moth, you are never fool enough to believe it had anything to do with the making of the honey: you know it is there to feed and—destroy. O Oom, O Tante, do not mistake the Death's-head moths of our civilization for the makers of its honey, or for the honey itself.

"Art, literature, science, the mastery over material conditions, whatsoever there is in this nineteenth-century civilization that strengthens the arm, or widens the heart, and broadens the intellect, and makes fuller the joy of life—extract it and make it yours.

"In our nineteenth-century civilization there is a little kernel of things rare and good and great, that have come down to us through the centuries, and that brave souls of labour have added their little quota of matter to even in our day. If you must crack the nut of our nineteenth-century civilization, we pray of you eat only this little kernel and throw away the great painted shell. For God's sake, do not try to eat the shell and throw away the kernel.

"You know, O my Oom and Tante, that, when the Jew smouses go round the country selling their goods, they sometimes sell to you clocks that glitter like gold;and you give for them your best sheep and oxen. But, when you take them to be tested by the town jeweller, you find they are not gold, but tin, gilt with brass; and they will not go.

"There is much, O Oom and Tante, in our civilization that is like to the Jew smous's clock! We warn you, be careful how you exchange your good old African wares for our modern merchandise. There is much brummagem about.

"For, believe us, Oom and Tante, there are some of us who have travelled the world round; we have seen and handled this thing, called nineteenth-century civilization. We have lived in vast cities, a few unconsidered streets in which contain as many souls as your whole land. We have seen half their population labouring continually without sunlight or fresh air, and, by a labour that knows no end, producing material things they never touch. We have seen white-faced children, who shall be the thinking, labouring, fighting men and women when we shall be in our graves, suck their white crusts dipped in tea, and look up at us with famished eyes: we have seen old men, after a long life of toil with no fireside to sit by, creep into the cold shadow of the workhouse, to die there. And we have seen also other sides of nineteenth-century civilization. We have been in the houses that are palaces, which all the world labours to make full and fair; we have pierced to their centres, and found there fair women surrounded by all earth yields, wearing silks which the Indian made for twopence a day, with which he bought a handful of rice and melted butter to keep him alive, and laces bending over which human eyes grew dim, and beside them in delicate cups stood tea whichTamilwomen near their hour of labour may have plucked with quivering fingers; and they have sat up on their sofas and looked at us with weary eyes, and asked, 'Is life worth living?' We have watched the fevered faces of men in the world's great stock exchanges, till pity seized us, and we could have cried: 'Is there no antifebrile that will slow this pulse and give these souls rest and peace?' We have stood at Monte Carlo, and seenprince and millionaire throw down coin as though it were not the life-blood of the peoples. We have seen lock-hospitals and the men and women that are in them, and also those who fill it but never come there; we have seen the parade, where human slaughter hides the dirt and ugliness of its trade behind plumes and gilt: we have seen the ballroom and the regal procession. We have seen, on the other hand, what is fair and beautiful in art and wonderful in science; we have seen brave and rare spirits, even amid the rush and dross of our civilization, walking peacefully on their own lofty little path, absorbing little, and imparting much. Yet, believe us, that in the still night we lie awake, and all that we have seen rises up as in a picture before us,—from Ratcliffe Highway with its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes and prostitutes; from the Champs Elysées to the Karoo; from Grosvenor Square to Bethnal Green,—there yet rises up no picture of life more healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the whole nature of man on earth, than yours in the wide plains of South Africa. We know all its deficiencies, its lack of a certain variety, the absence of certain brilliant elements which the human spirit may feed on elsewhere; and, yet, it rises up before us as something wholly strong, and virile, and full of promise. There are even times when we have felt we would rather be the little naked Kaffir children who play, fat and shining, with the kids on your kraal walls in the African sunshine than be most of the modern men and women we have known; for the life is more than meat and the body than raiment.

"Hold fast, Tante! Hold fast, Oom! You have much to lose. Be careful how you exchange it. Cling to your old manners, your old faiths, your free, strong lives, till you know what you are bartering them for.

"Tante, dear Tante, be not too anxious to change your old, straight, black skirt for the never-ceasing vagaries of modern fashion, that sap at the life of the modern woman as an open running tumour saps at the strength of a body. Do not be too anxious to change, for a pile of gauze or straw and textile flowers, that old black kappieof yours, that has shielded you for so many generations from the African sun and the African winds, in peace and in war, on kopje and on plain.

"Believe me, if some great artist should see you as you sit there by your out-spanned wagon, in your old black dress with your infant at your breast, and the African sky above you and the still veld round you, and should paint you as you are, you would hang in the world's great galleries, and generations to come of men and women would say, 'How strong, how harmonious!' For your old black dress, and the veld and the sky, and the baby at your bosom can never go out of fashion, as the hoop, and the patch, and the tilted hat, and fashionable furniture, go; for they have that eternal dew of the morning upon them which rests on all things growing up out of nature and necessity, for use and not for show. And if it should have happened that, in the sterner moments of your life, one should have depicted you truly when, in laager or beside wagon, you stood side by side with the man who was your companion, to defend that you prized, then, believe me, that old black kapje of yours would have become a helm, and men in future generations, looking on, would say 'There were giants in those days.'

"Tante, we, the newest of new women, stretch out our hands to you, the oldest of the old, in the African veld: and we pray of you, stay where you are, and hold fast by what you have, till we come and meet you. We are coming to you in our own way. Stay where you are till we can join hands. In your life of fellow-labour with man, in your social productiveness and activity, you have realized much of that which we are seeking. Do not force your great, free, labouring-woman's foot into the gegawed shoes of the parasite female, from which we are striving to withdraw ours; do not compel yourself to accept those insignia of degeneracy, whether in clothing or bearing, from which we to-day are so passionately striving to free ourselves. Hold by your simple brave life a little longer, produce your many children, guide your household, share man's burden with him, peace or war, till in a new social condition you pass without enervationor degeneration to new labours, and to a companionship with man in new and intellectual fields of toil. Do not, we beg of you, believe that, when you wear a French bonnet and have an eighteen-inch waist or trip to tennis in patent shoes, you have come any nearer to grasping the good, the true, or the beautiful that may be embedded in our nineteenth-century civilization. Feel no shame, we pray you, for that strong capacious form of yours; from that strong untrammelled body of yours shall yet spring a race strong to do or dare, such as grows not beneath the waistband of an enervated parasitic womanhood.

"Tante, wait for us, we are coming; you have something to teach us, we have something to teach you; and it may be that when we have met and joined hands we will work out something fairer and better for our people and the world than has often been. Only do not decay from your ancient simplicity of living and toiling before the time is ripe and you can move forward to new labours. It would have been better that you should have fallen in your early conflicts with savages and beasts, and that nothing were left of you now but a name and a heap of stones on the African plains, than that you should absorb the diseases of an enervated and voluptuous modern womanhood—for then you would only have died and not rotted.

"Oom Piet, we pray of you, be not anxious to adopt the fashions of the nineteenth-century gentlemen of the club and front stalls in the theatre. Be not too ready to discard your velschoens and your moleskin trousers and your short jackets. In these things your fathers did gallant deeds and loved freedom. Any coat that a brave man wears is fashion enough: and the world comes to recognize that in the end. Cling to your independence; and the day will come when your old round felt hat will hang on the walls of the African houses of the future as Oliver Cromwell's ancient hat hangs to-day in an English mansion; and men of the future generations will say, looking at it reverently: 'Such wore our fathers in the days when they did great things!'

"Do not think too lightly of your own knowledge;nor dream that the man who knows well the path to the brothel and the bar, and knows how to bear and bull the share-market, or who gains in one night's play as much as your farm yields you in a year, has any advantage over you. It is better to know how to find your way without a guide over hills and plains of your native land, and to be able to sleep well out under the stars with your head on a saddle, and when necessary to die for freedom on your kopjes, than to know all the paths of the modern city. Hold by your past; and the day will yet come when, instead of following the fashion, you will set it.

"South Africa has still need of her old African lion and lioness. Hold on a while longer; let your past die hard!

"Is it a wholly unrealizable dream, that, if you could but cling for a while longer to your own simple healthful forms of life and gold-untouched ideals, you might make it possible for us in South Africa to attain to a fairer and more healthful form of civilization than has elsewhere been reached? Is it wholly unrealizable that you might help us to escape in their worse forms the diseases of modern life, and attain to its good: while eschewing its evil? That we might arrive at that condition of simple living and high thinking, under which alone the spirit and body of man attain their full development, and continual progress is possible? Or must you, too, fall before the molten calf, and worship it?

"Does it seem strange to you, O Oom and Tante, that we sometimes think of you as an antidote? That in the heart of this nineteenth-century civilization we remember you sometimes, with your simple, free, strong lives, as a man living in some torrid valley, where all around him were fever-smitten, might remember a hardy mountain plant which he had seen growing on the hill-tops in his youth, and cry: 'Ah, could they but eat of it they might yet be saved!'

"Therefore we ask of you,notto accept too readily all that the men of this generation offer you, nor to be dazed by the glitter of our wares; but to select slowly and carefully, if you must select at all.

"For this nineteenth century is not the last century; nor is its civilization the last civilization; nor its ideals the last ideals! The twentieth is coming! And before it ends, it may be that this nineteenth will seem strangely distant! Men may then look over its mental wares as, after twenty years, one might look over a box containing the clothes of a dead elder sister, saying: 'This bit of real lace is still good, and that silk scarf; but the rest is all brummagem and long out of date.'

"For we, to-day, O Oom and Tante, with our new-found mechanical inventions, and our accumulations of material goods, are like little children who have just been given a rattle, and who spring it, till it deafens themselves and every one else besides, and can hear nothing else. We are like little long-tailed monkeys, who having found a bag of sugar think that there is now nothing left in life but to sit round it and eat it till they die.

"We are like to the children of Israel, when they built themselves the golden calf and then danced about it, saying: 'Thou art the Lord our God, and there is none like unto thee! From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, and thy years shall have no end!'—till a Moses, it may be, shall come, and smite it into powder: and of that powder, mingled with the waters of life, shall all the nations that worshipped drink, and they shall call it Marah. And then it may be that they will seek for a new God.

"We say it, well knowing the soft burst of laughter which will arise now to-day, when the door is not yet closed on the nineteenth century, and its ideals are yet dominating the men and women of the age—that the time may come when even men of the world, those who live in the present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognize that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of the community and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease—that the time will come when men will profess it in order to be called sane; that the railway-train which brings the prostitute,the stock exchange, and the foes to the freedom of a people, into the heart of its land, had better for humanity have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains; and had it taken two million years to come, so much better for the nation and the world; that the value of a species of conveyance whether for men or goods depends entirely to mankind on the nature of what it brings; that even that Ark of the Covenant of the nineteenth century—a new railway run by a joint stock company—is worthy of adoration, or is not, entirely by the increased strength of body, width of sympathy, clearness of intellect and joy in life it tends to confer on the folks among whom it runs; that a submarine cable used to whisper lies from land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to urge on the powerful to attack the weak, is the devil's own tube and has a connection direct with Hell; that a daily paper, not based on an earnest determination to disseminate truth, is a cup of poison, sent round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the people; that the man who from his place in the national assembly rises and states the increase in his nation's imports and exports as though he were describing its entire weal or woe, without consideration of the human suffering and degradation or joy and good it may have cost to produce them, or without calculation of the benefit or disease to be caused by their consumption—is a fool; that it is more disgrace to a land to have in it one hungry, work-crushed soul than to have no millionaire; when it shall be recognized that the greatest nation is not that which numbers most bodies, but most fully-grown free spirits, and fewest crushed and broken; that an empire over human flesh and lands, and not hearts, is an empire of disease; that a central power which cannot propel the blood of sympathy and a common fellowship to the remotest member of its group is on the path to cardiac failure and a sudden death.

"We know that thus to speak is to enter into the Holy of Holies of the nineteenth century, and therein to blaspheme. Nevertheless, O Oom and Tante, it is possible that the day is coming when the stock exchangeand the share market, in which the men of this generation worship the Lord their God, may pass away as the gladiatorial shows of the Roman Empire and the rule of the Inquisition, so mighty and overpowering in their days, have passed: it may be that a new Telemachus will yet leap down into the arena where men traffic with the life-blood of the nations, and, torn to pieces by the howling crowd, it will yet be said by future generations, 'From that day there were held no more share markets after the old fashion!'

"For this nineteenth century is not the last century! Nor are its institutions the last institutions! Nor is its God the last God!

"Therefore, seeing that these things are so, O Oom and Tante, and that we know not what part of our nineteenth-century wares shall be consumed up as stubble, be cautious how you traffic with us. Do not barter your old seventeenth-century wares, poor and simple as they may be, for that which you may have to part with again the next day. The twentieth century is coming: and it may be that, before it has reached its close, it may be found nearer the seventeenth than the nineteenth.

"Remember the Jew smous's clock!There be many Jew smouses going up and down in this civilization of ours; and they deal in other things besides clocks. They will traffic with you for your land, your freedom, your independence, your very souls—for they hold that 'every man has his price!'—and they will give you in exchange that which will not wear—a gilt-lined robe, which, soon as you wear it, will eat the flesh of freedom from off your bones and lick up the blood of liberty within your veins. Therefore, beware how you deal with them! That little which you have, hold fast till you see what shall come to pass.

"The last Belshazzar's feast has not been held! Be careful that, when the finger appears writing on the wall, you be not found also sitting at that table.

"Hold fast a little while longer, we pray of you, by your old ideals, your old manners, your simple old-world life. We—South Africa—the world, have need of you!"

So, were it possible that our words should reach him, we would fain apostrophize our old-world Boer and his wife. For our fear indeed is, not that he will exhibit any incapacity for accepting nineteenth-century ideals, but that he may swallow them too readily; and that South Africa, whose backbone he forms, may also suffer from that curvature of the spine, brought on by an excessive addiction to luxury and an ill-distribution of wealth, from which certain other peoples are dying.

To the other indictments which have been made, by those who have not understood him, against the Boer, it would seem hardly worth now referring, yet before we finally turn from him we may glance at them.

It has been said that he is priest-ridden.

It is undoubtedly true that the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church held in the past, and still to a limited extent hold to-day, a unique position among their people as compared with the mass of modern clergy.

We in the heart of the nineteenth-century civilization regard, and most rightly, with an almost unqualified scorn the modern man or woman who submits to priestly dictation. Where the priest has no means of gaining information, experience of life, or abstruse knowledge not shared by other members of his society, submission to his dicta or dependence on his advice can spring only from two causes—an intellectual feebleness, which prevents the use of the man's reason, or a moral cowardice, which causes him to shrink facing the responsibility of dealing with the moral and spiritual problems of life, and renders him desirous of having them dealt with vicariously.

But it has not always been so. In the middle ages, when war and the struggle with crude material conditions of life occupied almost the entire bulk of the population, the clergy, as the one class exempt from these labours, and therefore leisured and with facilities for travel or abstraction in study, were of necessity much more than clergy. They absorbed in themselves several now wholly distinct social functions. Their monasteries were the repositoriesof learning; they themselves were the guardians of national tradition, law, and history; their knowledge of plants and leisure to study disease made them the healers of the folk; experiments and improvements in agriculture were made in their grounds; born of the people, they were naturally their political as well as moral and intellectual guides, and it was to them that the oppressed people turned everywhere for advice and leadership. In such a social condition, every individual born with unusual intellectual aptitudes or inclinations was almost inevitably bound to gravitate towards the Church; and the priesthood therefore were, not merely through training and position, but by a species of natural selection, the intellectual leaders of the folk. Therefore, for some centuries the inclination towards culture and progress in a monarch, a nation, or an individual might be measured, strange as it now seems, by their esteem of and devotion towards the clergy. It was under the influence of the clergy that those Gothic churches rose which are the glory and incarnation of their age; and it was round the monastery and the church that the intellectual and socialized life of the people centred. Incidentally, it happened that those who were the ghostly guides of the people were also at the same time the leaders of the people in learning and the upholders of their human rights.

On a minute scale, and under very different conditions, the clergy of the Dutch churches have for nearly two centuries fulfilled the same complex functions towards their people in South Africa. They have, it is true, been the sacerdotal consolers and guides of their folk; but they have been infinitely more. They have been the representatives of that higher learning and culture which circumstances denied to the mass of their people; the parsonage and the church have been the social points round which the national life centred, and from which have radiated whatever of culture and social organization was attainable.

It has often been scornfully described how when, in some remote Boer farmhouse, one son showed unusual mental alertness, he was predestined for the Church; howoften, by rigid economy on the part of other members of the family, the money was accumulated to send him to college in Europe, and how on his return Mynheer was regarded with profound reverence and almost awe, even by his aged parents and the boys with whom he had minded lambs in childhood. This is true; but to suppose the feeling took its rise merely in a superstitious reverence for the black coat and ghostly prerogatives of the preacher would be to err profoundly. The man who returned from his studies differed materially, in the extent of his information and in his grasp on many aspects of life, from his brothers and companions who had remained tending the paternal flocks, or labouring in the family vineyards; and he had therefore necessarily certain social functions to perform, which could be performed by no other members of his community, and this apart entirely from his priestly office. The feelings with which he was regarded combined, with relation to one person, the feeling which the modern man entertains for his skilled lawyer, his family physician, his favourite writer, and his political leader. For years the clergy of the Dutch Church formed of necessity the connecting link between the Boer, widely scattered through remote districts, and the outer world. They were his advisers, often his representatives when he entered into contact with keen social and political elements of the hungry modern world. It was largely through them that such conditions of culture and knowledge as he had brought with him into the desert were maintained and enlarged; and they formed the channels through which were conveyed to him whatever influence of the modern world reached him. And nobly, on the whole, have they performed their task.

We believe that no one who is aware of our attitude towards sacerdotalism generally, to dogmatic theology everywhere, will accuse us of any undue bias in favour of the Dutch Reformed clergy on account of their function or abstract theological views, when we say that not only the Boer but South Africa generally is under debt to them.

Undoubtedly there must have been cases of self-seekingand self-assertion; and a certain narrowness is perhaps inherent inallforms of sacerdotal rule; but, viewed as a whole, their influence must be pronounced as having been beneficial, and this far beyond the ordinary mean. They have striven manfully to introduce both in education and social life much of what was healthiest and most vitalizing in our modern civilization, and to exclude much of that which was lowest and most sordid; and with singleness of purpose, with but few exceptions from the days when Erasmus Smit followed the fortunes of the early fore-trekkers and his aged wife harangued the British Commissioner at Maritzburg, they have stood faithfully by and headed their people in all times of oppression and need.

The time is very rapidly approaching when the unique relation between the Dutch pastor and his flock will finally have ceased. For the last twenty years the intellect of the Boer race has rapidly been finding openings for itself; the bar, the side-bar, the medical profession, the professor's chair, administrative and political life are absorbing the brilliant youths. The time is very rapidly approaching when the minister will differ from his flocks only in the fact that he has gone through a course of dogmatic theology, and when he will be equalled or excelled in general culture and knowledge of life by the large mass of his congregation; and, with this change, he will take his place side by side with other clergy, whose usefulness is confined to the performance of their ghostly functions; and, with this change also, the Church will cease, save in exceptional cases, to draw the best intellects of the people, as it has done in the past. But we believe that in the future no impartial survey will be possible of the history of South Africa during the last two hundred years without it being perceived how large is the debt which, not the Boer alone, but South Africa generally, owes to the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Churches.

Not only does it imply a curious miscomprehension to state that the rule of the clergy has been autocratic and oppressive, but it has been his Church which has formed for the Boer his most valuable exercise groundin Republican Government, and his relations to it and to his clergy exemplify markedly his curious inborn gift for self-government. Not only have his pastors been men of the people, rising up from among them and from no selected class, and imposed on him by no authority from without; but in every case each particular congregation selects its own leader, and frees itself of him when proved undesirable. The submission with which, in a still largely oligarchically governed country like England, a single individual is allowed to select, by his own autocratic will, son, brother, or dependant, and place him in control of a church and parish with all its inhabitants for a lifetime, is a condition unintelligible to the free South Africa Boer, and one he would not tolerate for an hour.

On the other hand, while he would not tolerate, and still less submit to, or respect, or regard as valid, any authority imposed on him from without, having once for himself selected an individual in whom he reposes full confidence, he is peculiarly willing, not merely to support and follow him, but to submit to his administration of the law, provided it is a law which he has at first agreed to recognize; and this is equally true whether the case be that of a pastor, field-cornet, commandant, or the president of a state. It is this inborn peculiarity which yields to the Boer his remarkable aptitude for Republican Government, and prevents him from being amenable to any other form of rule.

It is often objected, when one questions the wisdom of that unwritten law which ordains that, in the English Army, out of an empire of countless millions, all its officers should yet practically be selected from a comparatively small knot of wealthy families known as Society, and that such a process must hopelessly cripple thearmy; that the English nature is so addicted to oligarchic rule that the bulk of men born in England could never be made to respect, follow, or submit to, one of themselves; that the fact that a man was born in their street, shared the conditions of their daily life, and belonged to their own class, would cause them to look down upon and despisehim. Whether this be true of the English or not, with the Boers exactly the reverse is the case. It is precisely the man of the people, growing up among them, sharing their life and social condition, whom, when he has won their confidence and they have selected him to his post, they are willing to follow and support with a whole-heartedness seldom accorded to rulers or leaders of men.[75]They submit to the man because they regard him as the incarnation of their own will.

It is further often said, when one animadverts on the fact that members, connections, or, worse still, dependants of those small circles of families forming the administrative oligarchy in England, are almost always sent out as Governors to the Colonies of Canada and Australia and New Zealand, that the English-speaking people of these countries would not respect men chosen by themselves, and that no successful form of government would be possible were not foreigners sent them. Whether this would be the case in Canada or Australia we have not had personal means of judging, but in South Africa the very reverse is true. Were a prince of the Guelph family or a Duke's son sent out, though loaded with wealth and oligarchic honours, he would never have one half of the influence over or submission from the majority of South Africans that a man born among them, growing up among them, and selected by themselves, would readily obtain. "He is our man, who knows us and whom we know; we have chosen him, therefore we will follow him!"

It is the complete failure to understand this ineradicable instinct on the part of the African Boer which has caused so many of those who have attempted to interfere in South African affairs so grievously to fail. With a race in which this instinct is so inborn that it manifests itselfin all the relations of life, towards pastor, magistrate, and general; with an individual instinct for not obeying any person to whom it has not first consciously and deliberately delegated its authority; and then an instinct for following and supporting that person,—the South African nation, in which the Boer element predominates, is bound ultimately to become free, self-governing, independent, and republican.

It has been said of the Boer that he is bigoted and intolerant in religious matters. That this accusation should ever have been made has always appeared to us a matter of astonishment. It can only have been made by those who either know little or nothing of the true up-country Boer, or who confuse intolerance with the totally distinct attitude of a peculiar steadfastness to your own forms of faith. When we remember that it is not much over a century since the last execution for abstract opinion took place in Europe; when we recall the fact that within the memory of those still comparatively young, in the most enlightened community (or that which so considers itself), a man cultured, able, and public-spirited, was excluded from the performance of his legislative duties, imprisoned, and befouled by the Press and the nation on account of his view with regard to the nature of a first cause; when we mark that, in the same community, it was only the other day that Christians holding one form of shibboleth were with difficulty, and after fierce struggles, brought to admit brother Christians using another closely-allied shibboleth to any participation in public life or honours; when we consider the fact that to-day a Roman Catholic or a Jew is still in England excluded from the highest offices of State on the ground of his abstract views, and is on that ground regarded with scorn and disgust by the large mass of his fellow-countrymen; when we recall the fact that it is not twenty years since a book speculating on the abstract grounds of religion was refused at the bookstalls of the United Kingdom, and publicly destroyed in several cases; when we note the contemptible and grotesque riots which to-day occurin the heart of our most modern cities over the cut of a cassock or the burning of a pitiful pot of scent; when the gift of a work of art representing a mother and child to a board school is sufficient to rend an Anglo-Saxon community with fierce and brutal passions; when these things are considered, it is surely unintelligible that a charge of religious intolerance should be made against the South African Boer. With every excuse for an exceptional intolerance, a large portion of his ancestors having come to South Africa to escape religious persecution in Europe, he yet compares favourably with other nations in this respect, and the burnings of Quakers and witches which disgraced even New England have never been known in Africa. No man has ever suffered death for his religious views on these shores.

Firmly wedded to his own faith and not readily allowing any interference with his own attitude, he is yet singularly willing to abstain from interference with the abstract views of others. With regard to the up-country Boer of the present day, we are personally exceptionally qualified to pass an impartial judgment, having through life held views on theological matters not shared by the bulk of the societies about us; and we can unqualifiedly assert that it is not in the true primitive Boer farmhouse that an inquisitorial intolerance, or the desire to suppress the right of the individual soul to its own convictions, will ever make itself felt. There is far more bigotry and inquisitorial interference with the right of free thought in the English parsonage and the nineteenth-century drawing-room than in the primitive up-country Boer farmhouse. Wherever bigotry and intolerance make their appearance among the Boers, they will always be found to take their rise among the more cultured nineteenth-century part of the population. Many years ago a Boer woman once inquired of us how it was we never went to any church. We replied that our religion was not at all the same as hers, and that according to our view it was not necessary to go to church. She asked us whether we could explain to her what our religion was like. We replied that we could not, each man's religion was hisown concern: and she dropped the matter, nor referred to it again till nearly two years later, when she said: "You told me once that your religion differed from mine; but the more I know you the more I begin to think we must have the same religion. When I sit alone with my sewing I think very far away sometimes; and sometimes it occurs to me like this: If I had many children, and each one spoke a different language, I would try to talk to each child in the language it understood; it would be always me speaking, but in a different language to each child. So, sometimes I think, it is the same God speaking, only He speaks to you and to me in different languages."

When it is remembered that this remark was made by an unlettered Boer woman, who could neither read nor write, I think it will be allowed that the learned, philosophic, modern thinker may sometimes not have much to teach "the ignorant Boer" with regard to the true basis of philosophic religious toleration.

The third indictment which is made against the Boer with regard to religion is that he is superstitious, that he allows his religion to dominate every concern in his life, instead of confining it to that small sphere in which alone in modern life conformably with respectability its influence is allowed.

It may be at once stated that, in a certain sense, the statement that the African Boer is dominated by his religion is true, but in how far this indictment is one from which he suffers will vary with the standpoint of the individual considering it. We, in this latest phase of the nineteenth-century civilization, are so habituated to seeing men and women walking about, carrying with them wholly dead or more or less moribund religions which, like decaying flesh, corrupt the atmosphere, and render putrid the whole environment of those who bear it, that large numbers of us have reached a point at which we are unable to conceive of religion as anything but dead, a thing to be restricted within the narrowest possible limits, if life is to remain livable.

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