years sufficed to show that the most ordinary exercise of
the functions of government might be regarded as an "interference with
the domestic concerns and interior economy" of the European subjects
of the British Crown in South Africa. At the time of the permanent
occupation of the Cape (1806) the population of the colony consisted
of three classes: 26,720 persons of European descent, 17,657
Hottentots, and 29,256 returned as slaves. One of the first measures
of the British Governor, Lord Caledon, was the enactment of a series
of regulations intended to confer civil rights on the Hottentots,
while at the same time preventing them from using their freedom at the
expense of the European population. From the British, or even
European point of view, this was a piece of elementary justice to
which no man could possibly take exception. As applied to the
conditions of the Franco-Dutch population in the Cape Colony it was,
in fact, a serious interference with their "domestic concerns and
internal economy." And as such it produced the extraordinary protest
known to history as the "Rebellion" of Slaghter's Nek. There was no
question as to the facts. Booy, the Hottentot, had completed his term
of service with Frederick Bezuidenhout, the Boer, and was therefore
entitled, under the Cape law, to leave his master's farm, and to
remove his property. All this Bezuidenhout admitted; but when it came
to a question of yielding obedience to the magistrate's order, the
Boer said "No." In the words of Pringle, "He boldly declared that he
considered this interference between him (a free burgher) and _his_
Hottentot to be a presumptuous innovation upon his rights, and an
intolerable usurpation of tyrannical authority."

And the danger of allowing the Boers to pursue their
seventeenth-century dealings with the natives became rapidly greater
when the European Colonists, Dutch and English, were brought, by their
natural eastward expansion, into direct contact with the masses of
military Bantu south and east of the Drakenberg chain of
mountains--the actual dark-skinned "natives" of South Africa as it is
known to the people of Great Britain. The Boer frontiersman, with his
aggressive habits and ingrained contempt for a dark-skin,
disintegrated the Bantu mass before we were ready to undertake the
work of reconstruction. And therefore the local British authority soon
learnt that non-interference in the case of the Boer generally meant
the necessity o