I confine myself to quoting Dr. Kuyper.  He shows too plainly the character, passions, and hatreds of the Boers, to render comment necessary.  He acknowledges that the Great Trek, the emigration northwards, did not begin till after 1834, when, according to the manifesto of 1881, known as the Petition of Rights, “in consequence of the enforced sale of their slaves, the old patriarchal farmers were ruined.”  This document represents that it was treating them “with contumely” to offer them money compensation, adding regretfully “that the greater portion of the money remained in the hands of London swindlers.”  The regret and the contumely are difficult to reconcile.  Ancestors of the Boers had more than once acted in a similar manner towards the Dutch East India Company when dissatisfied with their administration, and unwilling to pay their taxes.  But Pro-Boers have a curious habit of magnifying things.  One would imagine, to hear them speak, that every Boer in the Cape had packed wife, children, and goods into ox-wagons and had trekked north.  As a matter of fact, the greater proportion remained behind, and their descendants formed the majority of the 376,000 whites enumerated in the census of 1891.  The Great Trek was really composed of various detachments which started one after another in 1836.  Statistics of the numbers of trekkers vary from 5,000 to 10,000.  I have not been able to trace whether these figures refer only to adult males, or whether they include the women and children.  In any case, when discussing South African affairs, we must always bear in mind the small number of persons concerned, in comparison with the vast extent of the area in question.

Not only these trekkers, but all who, from the period of the seventeenth century onwards, had had the tendency to wander from the Cape, belonged to the most adventurous and warlike portion of the population.  They had spread themselves over an enormous tract of country, and were in close touch with kaffirs and bushmen, cattle-lifters using poisoned arrows.  Living in isolated families, they acquired, in the course of their unceasing struggle with their savage neighbours, not only their qualities of daring and warlike skill, but habits of cruelty and cunning as well.

3.—­Essentially a Man of War and Politics.

Between the Dutchman of Amsterdam, Haarlem, the Hague, or Rotterdam, installed in his comfortable dwelling, cultivating his tulips, priding himself upon his pictures, and drinking his beer, and the Boer, pure and simple, there is not the slightest analogy.

This Dr. Kuyper acknowledges.  The Boer population is a compound of Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Hugenots, Germans and Scotchmen.  Krueger and Reitz are of German, Joubert and Cronje, of French origin.  Here is what Dr. Kuyper, himself, says of the Boers:—­