f territory which they had
rescued as a labour of love from the wilderness of nature, or from its
still wilder aboriginal inhabitants." When the Dutch Government made way
for that of Great Britain in 1806, and, still more, when that change was
sealed in 1814 by a transaction in which the Prince of Orange sold the
Cape to Great Britain for L6,000,000 against the wish and will of the
inhabitants, the little settlement entered upon a new phase of its
history, a phase, indeed, in which its people were destined by their
heroic struggle for justice, to enlist a world-wide sympathy on their
behalf.

[Sidenote: England's native policy.]

Notwithstanding the wild surroundings and the innumerable savage tribes
in the background, the young Africander nation had been welded into a
white aristocracy, proudly conscious of having maintained its
superiority notwithstanding its arduous struggles. It was this sentiment
of just pride which the British Government well understood how to wound
in its most sensitive part by favouring the natives as against the
Africanders. So, for example, the Africander Boers were forced to look
with pained eyes on the scenes of their farms and property devastated by
the natives without being in a position to defend themselves, because
the British Government had even deprived them of their ammunition. In
the same way the liberty-loving Africander burgher was coerced by a
police composed of Hottentots, the lowest and most despicable class of
the aborigines, whom the Africanders justly placed on a far lower social
level than that of their own Malay slaves.

[Sidenote: Slachter's Nek.]

No wonder that in 1815 a number of the Boers were driven into rebellion,
a rebellion which found an awful ending in the horrible occurrence of
the 9th of March, 1816, when six of the Boers were half hung up in the
most inhuman way in the compulsory presence of their wives and children.
Their death was truly horrible, for the gallows broke down before the
end came; but they were again hoisted up in the agony of dying, and
strangled to death in the murderous tragedy of Slachter's Nek. Whatever
opinions have been formed of this occurrence in other respects, it was
at Slachter's Nek that the first bloodstained beacon was erected which
marks the boundary between Boer and Briton in South Africa, and the eyes
of posterity still glance back shudderingly through the long vista of
years at that tragedy of horror.

[Sidenote: The mis