eaping, building,
making dams and canals, and at the same time to support themselves.
I have myself been an eye-witness of Boers coming to a village, and,
according to their usual custom, demanding twenty or thirty women to
weed their gardens, and have seen these women proceed to the scene of
unrequited toil, carrying their own food on their heads, their children
on their backs, and instruments of labor on their shoulders. Nor have
the Boers any wish to conceal the meanness of thus employing unpaid
labor; on the contrary, every one of them, from Mr. Potgeiter and Mr.
Gert Krieger, the commandants, downward, lauded his own humanity and
justice in making such an equitable regulation. "We make the people work
for us, in consideration of allowing them to live in our country."

I can appeal to the Commandant Krieger if the foregoing is not a fair
and impartial statement of the views of himself and his people. I am
sensible of no mental bias toward or against these Boers; and during the
several journeys I made to the poor enslaved tribes, I never avoided
the whites, but tried to cure and did administer remedies to their sick,
without money and without price. It is due to them to state that I was
invariably treated with respect; but it is most unfortunate that
they should have been left by their own Church for so many years to
deteriorate and become as degraded as the blacks, whom the stupid
prejudice against color leads them to detest.

This new species of slavery which they have adopted serves to supply the
lack of field-labor only. The demand for domestic servants must be met
by forays on tribes which have good supplies of cattle. The Portuguese
can quote instances in which blacks become so degraded by the love of
strong drink as actually to sell themselves; but never in any one case,
within the memory of man, has a Bechuana chief sold any of his people,
or a Bechuana man his child. Hence the necessity for a foray to seize
children. And those individual Boers who would not engage in it for the
sake of slaves can seldom resist the two-fold plea of a well-told
story of an intended uprising of the devoted tribe, and the prospect of
handsome pay in the division of the captured cattle besides.

It is difficult for a person in a civilized country to conceive that
any body of men possessing the common attributes of humanity (and these
Boers are by no means destitute of the better feelings of our nature)
should with one accord se