ittle account of the tremendous difficulties faced in
South Africa by small handfuls of white colonists in contact with hordes
of savages. The Colonial Government, with a knowledge of the conditions
gained only from well-meaning but somewhat prejudiced missionaries,
endeavoured from 1815 onwards to enforce an impracticable equality
between white and coloured men, and abolished slavery at one sudden
stroke in 1833 without reasonable compensation. A large number of the
Dutch, unable to tolerate this treatment, deserted the British flag.
Those that remained were under suspicion for more than thirty years, so
that political progress was very slow. It was not till 1854 that the
Colony received a Representative Assembly, and not until 1872, eighteen
years later than in Australia, and twenty-five years later than in
Canada, that full responsible government was established.

Piet Retief, one of the leaders of the voluntary exiles, had published a
proclamation in the following terms before he joined the trek: "We quit
this Colony under the full assurance that the English Government has
nothing more to require of us, and will allow us to govern ourselves
without its interference in the future. We are now leaving the fruitful
land of our birth, in which we have suffered enormous losses and
continual vexation, and are about to enter a strange and dangerous
territory; but we go with a firm reliance on an all-seeing, just, and
merciful God, whom we shall always fear and humbly endeavour to obey."
This was high language, yet after-events proved that a steady,
consistently fair treatment on our part would even then have reconciled
these men to a permanent continuance of British sovereignty.
Unfortunately, our policy oscillated painfully between irritating
interference and excessive timidity. First of all attempts were made to
stop the trek by force, then to compel the trekkers to return by cutting
off their supplies and ammunition, then to throttle their development of
the new lands north of the Orange and Vaal Rivers by calling into being
fictitious native States on a huge scale in the midst of and around
them, then tardily to repair the disastrous effects of this policy; but
not before it had led to open hostilities (1845). Hostilities, however,
had this temporarily good result, in that it brought to the front one of
the ablest and wisest of the Cape Governors, Sir Harry Smith, who
defeated the Boers at Boomplatz in 1848, established