At the other multitudinous, and in certain ways more important, effects of slavery on the peoples of South Africa, it will be more convenient to glance later.
In South Africa, as elsewhere among civilized peoples, what an enslaved race may have endured physically is amply avenged by emotional and social loss on the part of the enslaving till the balance of loss inclines, at last, rather in the direction of the owning than the owned.
The good, aboriginal, old South African thought, doubtless, as did his English brother in America, that when his slaves were safely landed, and the slaver had been paid and had sailed away, his black folk had been settled for, and that he had now nothing to do but enjoy in peace the fruits of their labour. But his descendants are learning, and will yet have to learn, with their American cousins, that what was paid on that day was but the first instalment of a long, national debt. We in South Africa have been steadily paying it for two hundred years, and when the last instalment will be due is not yet at all clear.
For the evils of slavery in a civilized community are like those birds of prey which may indeed leave their nests in the morning, but at nightfall return to the old nest, and are sure to be found there, nestling soft and warm.
We have now glanced at those facts in the early condition of the Boer which it is necessary we should look at if we are at all to understand his relation to the land of South Africa; and we are prepared to pass on to glance at his later history, and to an analysis of his condition to-day.
CHAPTER IV
THE WANDERINGS OF THE BOER
We have seen that, within a generation and a half from the landing of the Huguenots, they had intermarried and blended with the earlier settlers; and that their common language was the "Taal" (whether that language was a speech imported from some northern region, or a South African growth); that they were in possession of slaves, who planted and built for them; and that further, they were permeated by the conception that they were the chosen people of God; that South Africa was a personal bequest to themselves; that the aboriginal inhabitants of the land were the true Hittites, Perizzites and Jebusites, whom the God of the Jewish Scripture had ordered should be destroyed; and that they held, with an intensity of conviction which it is impossible for the nineteenth-century European fully to understand, that they were the very people to whom the threats and promises of the Jewish Scriptures were held out; and that, should they obey the commandments delivered unto them, their seed should become as the sand of the seashore for multitude, and they should inherit South Africa.
Settled on the beautiful Cape Peninsula, and in the lovely Western valleys, where the wild flowers bloom as nowhere else on the earth's surface; where the streams never fail, and the high mountains shut out the parching winds of the north, and where almost every plant known to civilized man will flourish; and where the few Hottentots and Bushmen who had inhabited the land having been easily exterminated or driven away, each man sat (not figuratively, but literally) under his own vine and his own fig-tree, enjoying the fruits thereof; it would be imagined that, at least for many generations, the descendants of the early settlers would have rested, cultivating and peopling their lands along the coast.
But it was not so.