The South African Boer forms never a mob. With his curious love of liberty and independent action, he combines a yet more curious instinct for cohesion and inter-action. There is no folk on earth which has exemplified, as this little mixed Teutonic people has done, the ancient Teutonic instinct for combining a high standard of personal freedom with a strong social organization.
Take at random a handful of African Boers; let them wander away into some desert and be unheard of for a few years. When you find them again, they are a people organized and inter-acting, with the true old Teutonic institutions—the district gatherings, the central government, the force for defence composed of all the burghers, under their local chiefs—always the same outline preserved, and always instinctive re-adaptations and variations according to the varying conditions of the new society. Studying this matter, one is forcibly reminded of the instinct in a swarm of bees, which, however often removed from spot to spot, still seek at once to deposit their old hexagonal cells, yet always varying the shape of the hive as they are compelled to build it between two plates of glass, in a hollow tree, or in a hand-made hive. To the scientific student of the evolution of human societies nothing in the range of modern history is more interesting and curious than the analytical study of the little states which the South African Boer has always tended to deposit in varied yet kindred forms.
In the South African Republic, or Transvaal, the Boer has shaped a social organism singularly strong, and at the same time plastic; the external governing power being responsive to the will of the electorate.
Of the latter history of this state it must suffice to note a fact, perhaps not unknown to any student of modern affairs, that in the 'seventies of the nineteenth century an attempt was made to wrest their country from this people and to annex it to the British Empire. All the world knows how at Paardekraal, on the 13th of December, 1880, the little nation gathered itself together, each man, taking a stone in his hand, placed it upon a heap beside those of his fellows, swearing as he set it there that he would never lay down his arms till the Republic was freed—a heap which has been carefully preserved as a national monument. How at Ingogo, Laing's Nek, and Amajuba they fought, all the world knows also. How England, dominated at that moment by that wiser and more far-seeing Jekyll, who in the past has never failed to exist somewhere within her bosom, ready for action when not overborne by his fellow, the purblind and all-grasping Hyde, restored to the Republic the recognition of its independence; thereby saving England from the indelible disgrace of a persistent attempt to crush a great and free little people, and from the permanent loss of South Africa, which, had she persisted in her course, would long ere this have yielded her no foothold in the southern seas, this also all the world knows. How, gold being found in vast quantities in the Republic, the eyes of all men of greed and wealth-lust turned towards this little land from all parts; how the Chartered Company incorporated by the Hyde of England while the Jekyll slept, having become needy and greedy, and finding the land given it not filling its pockets as it desired, could wait no longer, and sent in an armed force to take possession of the goldfields; how the Republicans started to their feet to drive out the invaders; and how at Doorn Kop, on the 3rd of January, 1896, was fought the most memorable battle of modern times; for here, for the first time in history, the military force of the international capitalist and speculator, armed, hired, and equipped by him, without even the decent covering of a national cloak to hide from the world the ugly outline of its greedy form, met the simple citizens of a state, farmers and peasants and townsmen, who leaped up from their New Year's feast, and thrusting a slice of bread or New Year's cake into their pockets, and a hunk of meat into their saddle-bags, mounted and were off to meet the foe; met it and defeated it—so opening the long campaign of the twentieth century which began between two little African kopjes and which will end on the earth's mightiest battlefields—this, too, all the world knows.[70]
The descendants of the original white inhabitants of the land, entering it a century before we English folks arrived, have, as we have seen, spread themselves out over the whole country, and now form the substratum of the white African Nation. In the Cape Colony, which is still politically connected with the Island of Britain, they number at least three out of five of the white inhabitants of the country. In their lovely old homes in the Western Province, buried away among oaks, and surrounded by vineyards and fruit gardens laid out by their ancestors two centuries ago, the farming descendants of the Dutch-Huguenot live with simple plentifulness amid their supremely beautiful surroundings. In the remote Midlands and Northern and Eastern frontier districts of the Cape Colony they still live often, as we have described, in their simple homes, mighty men of the gun, and rulers over flocks and herds. While in our Colonial towns and villages the descendants of these farming folks are found, whom education has transformed, often in one generation, from the Taal-speaking Boer to the foremost rank of the nineteenth-century civilization and intellectual culture; they are, as we have seen, often among our most able lawyers, our best judges, our most skilful magistrates and civil servants; while the lists of our university examinations are filled with the names of both men and women of Boer descent.
Such is the Boer and such are his descendants in the Cape Colony to-day.
In the two Republics which he has founded he will also be found in both the types, the old and the new; now as the old fore-trekker, with the faiths and virtues and the vices of the seventeenth century strong in him; then as the cultured professional man and the child of the nineteenth century, with all its additions and omissions.
In the Colony of Natal, the northern part is still mainly populated by Boers, the descendants of those men who there founded their early Republic of Natal, and remained when the rest of their fellows trekked across the Drakensberg into the Transvaal.
Taking South Africa thus as a whole, the descendants of the Dutch-Huguenots outnumber the white men of all other races put together, and immensely those of purely British descent. But everywhere the process of intermarriage has been so vast and rapid during the last thirty years that it is no more possible to draw a quite sharp dividing line between the two races. There are probably to-day no large South African families, Dutch or English, which have not during the last thirty years intermarried. And in another generation the word Dutchman and Englishman will have lost all meaning and be heard no more; we shall then be only the blended South African Nation.