s and grazing-farms or roamed
about the country. In 1787 the Dutch government passed a law subjecting
these wanderers to certain restrictions. The effect of this law was to
place the Hottentots in more immediate dependence upon the farmers, or
to compel them to migrate northward beyond the colonial border. Those
who chose the latter alternative had to encounter the hostility of their
old foes, the Bushmen, who were widely spread over the plains from the
Nieuwveld and Sneeuwberg mountains to the Orange river. The colonists
also, pressing forward to those territories, came in contact with these
Ishmaelites--the farmers' cattle and sheep, guarded only by a Hottentot
herdsman, offering the strongest temptation to the Bushman. Reprisals
followed; and the position became so desperate that the extermination of
the Bushmen appeared to the government the only safe alternative.
"Commandoes" or war-bands were sent out against them, and they were
hunted down like wild beasts. Within a period of six years, it is said,
upwards of 3000 were either killed or captured. Out of the organization
of these commandoes, with their field-commandants and field-cornets, has
grown the common system of local government in the Dutch-settled
districts of South Africa.

It was not to the hostility of the natives, nor to the hard struggle
with nature necessary to make agriculture profitable on Karroo or veld,
that the slow progress made by the colonists was due, so much as to the
narrow and tyrannical policy adopted by the East India Company, which
closed the colony against free immigration, kept the whole of the trade
in its own hands, combined the administrative, legislative and judicial
powers in one body, prescribed to the farmers the nature of the crops
they were to grow, demanded from them a large part of their produce, and
harassed them with other exactions tending to discourage industry and
enterprise. (See further SOUTH AFRICA, where the methods and results of
Dutch colonial government are considered in their broader aspects.) To
this mischievous policy is ascribed that dislike to orderly government,
and that desire to escape from its control, which characterized for many
generations the "boer" or farmer class of Dutch settlers--qualities
utterly at variance with the character of the Dutch in their native
country. It was largely to escape oppression that the farmers trekked
farther and farther from the seat of government. The company, to contro