For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the gradual spreading of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld which lay to the north of them.  Cattle raising became an industry, but in a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms are necessary for even small herds.  Six thousand acres was the usual size, and five pounds a year the rent payable to Government.  The diseases which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and Australia, been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox cleared the country for the newcomers.  Further and further north they pushed, founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale of the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered dwellings.  Already the settlers were showing that independence of control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most prominent characteristic.  Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an older but weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to revolt.  The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal cataclysm which followed the French Revolution.  After twenty years, during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between England and France in the final counting up of the game and paying of the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in 1814 to the British Empire.

In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one.  We had it by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of purchase.  In 1806 our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and took possession of Cape Town.  In 1814 we paid the large sum of six million pounds to the Stadholder for the transference of this and some South American land.  It was a bargain which was probably made rapidly and carelessly in that general redistribution which was going on.  As a house of call upon the way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the country itself was looked upon as unprofitable and desert.  What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which we were buying for our six million pounds?  The inventory would have been a mixed one of good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we fought with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace and prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men.  The future should hold something very good for us in that land, for if we merely count the past we should be compelled to say that we should have been stronger, richer, and higher in the world’s esteem had our possessions there never passed beyond the range of the guns of our men-of-war.  But surely the most arduous is the most honourable, and, looking back from the end of their journey, our descendants may see that our long record of struggle, with its mixture of disaster and success, its outpouring of blood and of treasure, has always tended to some great and enduring goal.