dividual wrong-doers, and that the
institution of private property was unknown among the Hottentots. The
only method by which the individual could be punished was by punishing
the tribe, and he therefore proposed to capture the tribe and their
cattle. But this was a course of action which was repugnant to the
Directors' sense of justice. It aroused, besides, a vision of
reinforcements ordered from Batavia, and of disbursements quite
disproportionate to the practical utility of the Cape station as an
item in the system of the Company. In vain Van Riebeck urged that a
large body of slaves and ten or twelve hundred head of cattle would be
a great addition to the resources of the settlement. The Chamber of
Seventeen refused to sanction the proposals of the commander, and, as
its own were impracticable, nothing was done. The Beechranger tribe
escaped with impunity, and the Hottentots, as a whole, were emboldened
to make fresh attacks upon the European settlers.

[Sidenote: The Afrikander stock.]

This simple narrative is a lantern that sheds a ray of light upon an
obscure subject. Two points are noticeable in the attitude of the home
authority. First, there is its inability to grasp the local
conditions; and second, the underlying assumption that a moral
judgment based upon the conditions of the home country, if valid, must
be equally valid in South Africa. By the time that the home authority
had become Downing Street instead of the peripatetic Chamber of
Seventeen, the field of mischievous action over which these
misconceptions operated had become enlarged. The natives were there,
as before; but, in addition to the natives, there had grown up a
population of European descent, some thirty thousand in number, whose
manner of life and standards of thought and conduct were scarcely more
intelligible to the British, or indeed to the European mind, than
those of the yellow-skinned Hottentot or the brown-skinned Kafir. A
century and a half of the Dutch East India Company's government--a
government "in all things political purely despotic, in all things
commercial purely monopolist"--had produced a people unlike any other
European community on the face of the earth. Of the small original
stock from which the South African Dutch are descended, one-quarter
were Huguenot refugees from France, an appreciable section were
German, and the institution of slavery had added to this admixture the
inevitable strain of non-Aryan blood. But t