The lap-dog who lies upon my knee, the mastiff who guards my house, are both so wholly desirable that I desire to see neither of them extinguished. Shall we value our human varieties less than my dogs?
Yet probably, and I should say more than probably, where nature herself obliterates the distinction of race, and allows a mighty and permanent affection between man and woman to cross its limits of race, then I should be inclined to say nature herself gives a sanction which may set the lesser utilities at defiance and consecrates the union of distinct breeds; but without so mighty a permit it is perhaps well that we who are but children in this matter, and cannot see farther than our hands can reach, should pause and move with caution. For the future of the race on earth is bound up in this matter.
NOTE C
THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF THE BOER (1899)
I have been asked to write an account on the domestic life of the South African Boer. If the term "Boer" be used to signify, as it sometimes is, the entire population of South Africa which is descended from the early Dutch settlers of two or three hundred years ago, and of the French Huguenots, who, driven from their native land in the seventeenth century, landed in South Africa and mingled their blood with that of the earlier settlers, the task would not be an easier one than to write a description of the domestic life of the whole American people. For the Africanders, as the Dutch-French-Huguenots descendants now call themselves, are not at the present day less complex and many-graded than the Americans themselves. In our cities and towns they form a large proportion of our most cultured and brilliant citizens, whose domestic life differs not at all from that of other cultured South Africans, English, French, or Germans in descent. Many of our most brilliant lawyers and able politicians and professional men are of this race: and year by year the names both of men and women of this race increasingly fill our lists of successful university students.
If, however, the term "Boer" be taken, as it should be, to signify only that portion of the race who have remained farmers (the word "Boer" literally means a farmer), and who in the outlying districts of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, Natal, and the Transvaal, have preserved unchanged the language, manners and ideas of their forefathers of the seventeenth century, then the task is far more easy. For this wonderful and virile folk—driven into the wilds of Africa a couple of centuries ago—are not merely dominated in their domestic and in their public life by old ideals and methods, but a strange uniformity exists everywhere.
Whether we find the primitive Boer on the wide grass plains of the Transvaal and the Free State, the Karoo plains of central and western Cape Colony, or the bush lands nearer the coast, in appearance, ideas, and, above all, in habits and the arrangement of his domestic life, a complete and unique conformity exists.
The typical South African Boer lives on his own land, a farm, covering a stretch of country; it may be six, twelve, eighteen or more miles in length. On the spot where his homestead now stands, it may be that a few generations ago his grandfather or great-grandfather, on his first journey into the wilds in search of a new home, drew up his great ox-wagon beside some slowly oozing fountain, or on the banks of some stream with inexhaustible pools, which had never yet been visited by the foot of white man, and determined here to fix his home. He called the place perhaps "Jakals' Fontein," from the number of jackals which came down to drink or watch for prey the first night; "Wilde Kats Draai," from the wild cat they killed next day; or "Ti'er Kloof," from the huge tiger-leopard killed in the ravine beyond the fountain; and there, after a longer or shorter struggle with wild beasts or poisoned-arrow-shooting Bushmen, he built his house and kraals, and settled himself and his descendants.
Here, as the years passed, and leopard, lion, and wild dog became exterminated, and the wild bucks on whose flesh in early days he lived became more rare, he raised his little square or oblong house of rough stones or unburnt bricks; behind his house, surrounded by walls of rough stone or high-piled branches of the mimosa thorn, he built his kraals (or enclosures for the stock to sleep in at night), which were always placed very close to the house, that they might be more easily protected from wild beasts or savages.
By-and-by he generally built a dam, larger or smaller, as the case might be, for catching the rain-water, which in rainy seasons floods the plains, or which might be fed by his fountain if strong enough. Here his stock came to drink at evening; and if the supply of water were large enough, he often enclosed a small patch of land below the dam with a stone wall, planted a few fig and peach trees, and made a small garden.