Early in the century the Boers began to trek away from the sphere of British rule.  They were trekkers before that, indeed.  Even in the days of Van Riebeck (1650) they had trekked away from the crowded parts, and opened up with the rifle and the plough new reaches of country; pioneering in a rough but most effective way, driving back the savage races, and clearing the way for civilization.  There is, however, a great difference to be noted between the early treks of the emigrants and the treks ‘from British rule.’  In the former (with few exceptions) they went, knowing that their Government would follow them, and even anxious to have its support and its representatives; and the people who formed their migrating parties were those who had no or insufficient land in the settled parts, those who were starting life on their own account, or those whose families could not be located and provided for in the cramped circumstances of the more occupied parts.  In the other case, rich and poor, old and young, went off as in the days and in the fashion of Moses or Abraham.  They went without leave or help of the Government; secretly or openly they went, and they asked nothing but to be left alone.  They left their homes, their people, the protection of an established Government and a rough civilization, and went out into the unknown.  And they had, as it appeared to them, and as it will appear to many others, good reasons for taking so grave a step.  For, although the colonists of South Africa enjoyed better government, and infinitely more liberty, under British rule, than they had under the tyrannical regime of the Dutch East India Company twenty years before (against which the Boers had twice risen in rebellion) there were many things which were not as they should have been.  A generation had grown up which knew nothing of the arbitrary and oppressive rule of the old Dutch Company.  Simple folks have long memories, and all the world over injuries make a deeper and more lasting impression than benefits; and the older generation of Boers, which could recall a condition of things contrasting unpleasantly with British rule, also remembered the executions of Slagters Nek—­a vindication of the law which, when all allowance has been made for disturbed times, and the need of strong measures to stop rebellion in a newly-acquired country, seems to us to-day to have been harsh, unnecessary, and unwise in policy, and truly terrible in the manner of fulfilment.

The Boers have produced from their own ranks no literary champion to plead or defend their cause, and their earlier history is therefore little known, and often misunderstood; but to their aid has come Mr. George McCall Theal, the South African historian, whose years of laborious research have rescued for South Africa much that would otherwise have been lost.  In his ‘History of the Boers’ Mr. Theal records the causes of the great emigration, and shows how the Boers stood up for fair treatment, and fought the