Governments, the same class of progress is everywhere visible,—just as much visible in the far Transvaal as along the north-western border of the Cape Colony, or in the nearer and more recently settled district called the "Middleveld" of the Orange Free State-a district whose progress has been accelerated by its nearness to the Diamond Fields. There are hundreds of English farmers living away from the coast, whose houses are quite as open to reproach, on the grounds of clay floors and ugliness, as are the worst of those of the Boers. Yet these farmers had advantages the Boers never had. They had come prepared with money, brought from Europe, or perhaps earned on the Diamond Fields, to settle and set up houses for themselves. Their capital, much or little, was in their own hands, and could be laid out upon improvements. How different from the condition of the Boer! This man, with his family, surrounded by women and helpless little children, driving before him a few animals, then of no market value, but which he had to defend from hour to hour against watchful and everhostile enemies, having saved a remnant of his stock and his family from fever, thirst, war, and the desert, at length found a spot whereon he could make his home. He had to commence almost like another Adam. Yet in twenty-five years he had not only created a home, but a country, which was worth taking from him. This is what angers the Boers. It has been asserted that the country was insolvent-hopelessly broken and bankrupt. It has been proved that it owed a quarter of a million. The people, however, point to their 145,000 square miles of new territory, traversed in every direction by roads; adorned in a few places with churches, small towns, and rising villages; and sprinkled over, at distances of nine or ten miles apart, with the dwellings of faithful and persevering pioneers. They say:

"The debt of which you accuse us bears no proportion to the work we have done-is nothing compared to the value of the wilderness we have reclaimed. Crime is unknown amongst us. We have jails, but they are comparatively empty, although convictions here bear a very large proportion to the reported criminality. We fled from you years ago-leave us in peace. We shall pay our debts easily

enough your presence can but tend to increase them, and to drive us through fresh wanderings, through new years of bloodshed and misery, to seek homes whither you will no longer follow us. We conquered and peopled Natal; you reaped the fruits of that conquest. What have you done for that colony? Do you seek to do with our Transvaal as you have done with it,-to make our land a place of abomination, defiled with female slavery, reeking with paganism, and likely, as Natal is, only too soon to be red with blood?" 1

It is with arguments such as these, urged by desperate men, those who have, in the name of England, annexed the Transvaal, will soon have to deal; and it is to prepare England and the English people for a ready comprehension of difficulties rapidly arising, that I have ventured, in plain and unmistakable language, to put the Boers' case—as Boers see it-before the nation.

The Dutch South Africans, as a people, have never been averse to religious or educational influences, though they have been accused of being hostile to both. Occasionally, however, one finds, by reference to the works of persons who cannot be accused of being prejudiced in their favour, little incidents that show their character in a very different and much brighter light than one would expect from unfriendly critics. The Rev. Mr Thomas, a Welshman, even so far back as 1858, spoke of them in the following way: Although the coloured people are seldom allowed to enter the Dutch Church, still the masters build commodious places of worship for them, and even support missionaries who labour amongst them." He gives an instance of this, as seen by him at Victoria West, which was then, and still is, as much a piece of Boerland as if situated north of the Vaal River. He mentions that the Rev. Mr Leibrandt, whom he calls "the respected and much-beloved minister of the Dutch Reformed Church," had succeeded in erecting a large

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1 "Here, in Natal, are nearly 400,000 natives who have come in under shelter of the British Government to escape the tyranny of their own chiefs. They are allowed as much land as they want for their locations. They are polygamists, and treat their women as slaves, while they themselves idle, or do worse. There is little wonder that with such surroundings few English colonists think of Natal as a permanent home."-FROUDE.

and substantial chapel for the use of the natives-for whom the Dutch farmers supported a missionary. Again, we find that the services to the natives at all the mission stations were almost invariably in Dutch, proving sufficiently that it was the civilising influence of the Dutch and their language that had brought light first amongst the converts. In page 47 of his book, the same writer, after describing the Boers' conquest of Sechele, says:—

"Being taught by sad experience that the level country or open field would give his foe the advantage over him, Sechele had selected a most inaccessible spot upon which to build his new town. It was a high and very rocky hill in the midst of others; and to prevent the approach of the Dutch cavalry he had sunk holes around the foot of it. Since the breaking up of the mission at Kolobeng, six or seven years previously, a native teacher named 'Paul' had been left with Sechele. Not satisfied with a man of the same colour as himself, and despairing of getting another European missionary from the London Missionary Society, Sechele appealed to Pretorius, the President of the Transvaal Republic, for German missionaries, and obtained them. These missionaries were Hanoverians, and had been resident at Liteyana for some time before we passed through."

In addition to this incident, which shows the desire of the Dutch to extend honest Christian influences even amongst the unfriendly tribes, it has come within my own observation that much consideration has been shown to missionary interests in the Transvaal proper. At many places, the most noteworthy of which is Botsabelo, large establishments are maintained for the conversion of the heathen; and it is a matter of complaint amongst Englishmen, and persons engaged in trade, that too many facilities, and too many protections, and too much consideration, have been given by the Dutch Government to these institutions. It is a factand I wish here to draw especial attention to it—that the stations are permitted to import goods duty free, whereby they are enabled to undersell the storekeepers and shopkeepers of neighbouring villages. That trading forms a marked feature of some of the foreign mission stations in the Transvaal is simply undeniable truth. A couple of years ago I wanted saddles at Middleburg, which I could only obtain at my price, by the shopkeeper from whom I desired to purchase obtaining them from the missionary, who had imported them duty free.

In the matter of education, the Boers, notwithstanding the slanders of their enemies, can be proved to be eminently progressive. I have never known any other people whose children, of themselves, so earnestly sought for and so constantly desired to be placed within reach of modern culture. I have known English children shunning the schoolmaster as they would the plague, whilst little Boers were glad to avail themselves of every possibility of acquiring instruction. Their Church law and their domestic system both tend strongly in this direction; and it is want of opportunity, and not want of earnestness, that should be cited as an allsufficient reason for the (to casual observer) apparent ignorance of too many families. I have known repeated instances where the children of even the poorer Boers, struggling for light and knowledge, complained, with justice and reason, to their parents of idleness and neglect on the part of the masters hired to teach them.

In connection with this subject, it is not a little interesting to remark the hold education has taken in the Orange Free State, essentially a Boer republic. Its grants for educational purposes are greater, in proportion to the number of its inhabitants, and its allowances for teachers and schools of the normal and rudimentary type are more liberal, than those of any of our colonies. In every village, and in nearly every ward, schoolhouses have been built at an expense of from £300 to £400 each; and the provision for teachers is sufficient to enable them to live and marry in comfort and respectability.

In the district of the Great Middleveld, which a few years ago was but a trackless plain of limestone and sand, great and important changes have been effected through the loan by Government to the farmers of capital destined for an educational fund. This money was lent to proprietors, on mortgage (at from 6 to 12 per cent per annum), for purposes of permanent improvement. By it, dams in great numbers, and having an enormous collective capacity, have been constructed to retain the rainfall over a previously arid and desert country. The interest of the money so invested forms a permanent source of income for the Education Board. Whether one looks to the Boers of Natal, where there are

still a few-to the Cape Colony, where they are the majority -or to the Free State and the Transvaal, in which they are predominant, hearty praise and genuine admiration must be the result of an examination of their attempts at selfeducation. Children are not, by the Church law, admitted to Church membership by confirmation till they can show some progress in the knowledge of that which is the foundation of all true education-"religion and the truth of the Gospels." This Church regulation is capable of being made more stringent as years roll on and educational facilities become multiplied. I have thus no doubt whatever that these peasant proprietors will, ere long, place themselves on a level with, if not ahead of, races labouring under no such terrible disabilities as they have been subject to during their forty-four years of sorrowful journeyings in the wilderness.

I have said before that their character is deeply impressed by their long period of homeless flight. This is remarkable even in the names they have given to their settlements. Weenen, in Natal, means "the weeping;" Lydenberg, in the north-east of the Transvaal, is "the mountain of sorrow." The "trek" has set its mark even on their household ways. Hundreds of families, down to the present hour, have not abandoned the practice to which they were reduced in the wilds, of sleeping half dressed, ever ready to repel an enemy, or to protect their stock from wild beasts and prowling thieves. This habit, so easily accounted for, is abhorrent to the untravelled European, who, not finding in his own experience anything to justify such a departure from civilised custom, most uncharitably sets down these poor people as persons of dirty ways and uncleanly habits, because they are not as he is. I think it must have been many years after the Israelites made good their journey over the Jordan before they had regained the point at which the commencement of their great "trek" found them. An impartial historian, comparing the two peoples, would certainly be inclined to give a great deal of credit to the South African Dutch for their adherence to virtue, their fidelity to religion, and their steadfast clingings to old customs and old ways through long periods of contact with an ever-present barbarism, and of separation from every refining and conservative influence.