[52] See Note D, The Domestic Life of the Boer.
[53] The spoons being generally of very soft metal, are easily destroyed by rough usage.
[54] Smous = hawker.
[55] Hart-kwaal = heart-complaint.
[56] Nachtmaal = Holy Communion.
[57] It is perhaps hardly necessary to repeat that by the term "Boer" it is not intended to signify all the Dutch-descended inhabitants of South Africa, but only such as have retained the old seventeenth century habits and ideas of their forefathers, and who speak only the "Taal." Probably almost half the inhabitants of South Africa of Dutch or French descent now speak English, and are often entirely indistinguishable from the other inhabitants of the country; the interest therefore which attaches itself to the Boer who has preserved until to-day the manners and ideas of two centuries ago does not attach to them. We shall deal with such persons later among the other nineteenth century folk of South Africa.
[58] That on the higher planes of development, where the individuality becomes complex and varied, the unions of Socrateses with their Xanthippes, or fruitless celibacies, are not universal, can only be accounted for by the fact that, unlike the artificial blocks which the carver may shape as he will, the men and women of any society or age are part of one organic body and, except where unhealthy social conditions prevent their being exposed to the action of the same forces, will tend to develop in the same direction, and again to meet on the higher planes of growth as they did in the lower. Therefore the most highly developed and individualized men and women of any society, if they have been exposed to the action of the same cultivating forces, may often be compared to those delicate and intricate puzzles carved from one ball of ivory by the Chinese, which only need to be brought into juxtaposition to show how admirably they harmonize and how essentially they form but one whole.
[59] Speaking of the Boer insurrection of 1815, Sir Andries Stockenstrom in his Autobiography says of two families of Boers, who were surrounded by British soldiers: "They placed themselves in a position of defence under their wagons. One of the soldiers by whom they were surrounded having ventured within range, entreating them to surrender, was shot dead on the spot. The fire was, of course, returned. Bezuidenhout's wife, reloading the guns as they were discharged, kept encouraging her husband and brother Fabre not to surrender; until at last Bezuidenhout fell dead, riddled with bullets, and she and Fabre were seized dangerously wounded, as well as her son, a boy of twelve, slightly."
[60] This was written in 1890, nine years before the War of the Republics began.
[61] It is hardly necessary to state that we are not referring to the labouring classes in modern societies, in which, when the male and female are both exposed to the same conditions of labour, the same intellectual homogeneity is to be observed. The position of these women differs, however, from that of the Boer woman in the less social consideration they enjoy, this depending on causes too complex to be here entered on.