To an English nobleman, who, in the course of an interview, remarked, ‘My father was a Minister of England, and twice Viceroy of Ireland,’ the old Dutchman answered, ‘And my father was a shepherd!’ It was not pride rebuking pride; it was the ever-present fact which would not have been worth mentioning but for the suggestion of the antithesis.  He too was a shepherd, and is—­a peasant.  It may be that he knows what would be right and good for his people, and it may be not; but it is sure that he realizes that to educate would be to emancipate, to broaden their views would be to break down the defences of their prejudices, to let in the new leaven would be to spoil the old bread, to give unto all men the rights of men would be to swamp for ever the party which is to him greater than the State.  When one thinks on the one-century history of the people, much is seen that accounts for their extraordinary love of isolation, and their ingrained and passionate aversion to control; much too that draws to them a world of sympathy.  And when one realizes the old Dopper President hemmed in once more by the hurrying tide of civilization, from which his people have fled for generations—­trying to fight both fate and Nature—­standing up to stem a tide as resistless as the eternal sea—­one sees the pathos of the picture.  But this is as another generation may see it.

To-day we are too close—­so close that the meaner details, the insincerity, the injustice, the barbarity—­all the unlovely touches that will by-and-by be forgotten—­sponged away by the gentle hand of time, when only the picturesque will remain.

In order to understand the deep, ineradicable aversion to English rule which is in the heart and the blood and the bones of every Boer, and of a great many of their kindred who are themselves British subjects, one must recall the conditions under which the Dutch came under British rule.  When, in 1814, the Cape was finally ceded to England, it had been twice acquired and held by conquest.  The colonists were practically all Dutch, or Huguenots who had adopted Dutch as their language, and South Africa as their home.  In any case they were people who, by tradition, teaching and experience, must have regarded the English as their enemies; people in whom there must have been roused bitter resentment against being handed over with the land to their traditional enemies.  Were they serfs or subjects? has been asked on their behalf.  Had Holland the right, the power, over freemen born, to say to them, ’You are our subjects, on our soil, and we have transferred the soil and with it your allegiance to England, whose sovereignty you will not be free to repudiate.’  The Dutch colonist said ‘No.’  The English Government and the laws of the day said ‘Yes.’