rmament, but possessed of
certain counterbalancing resources, due either to the nature of his
country, to his own natural characteristics, or to a combination of
both.[65] Of such resources the Boers at the close of the nineteenth
century possessed, largely by inheritance, a full share. With their
forefathers, the early Afrikanders, loneliness had been a passion to
which their very presence north of the Orange river was due. Flying
from society, from burdens and responsibilities which they considered
intolerable, from pleasures which seemed to them godless, from a stir
which bewildered them, and from regularity which wearied them, they
had penetrated the wilds northward in bands as small as possible, each
man of which was wrapped in a dream of solitude, careless whither he
went so long as he went unseen. It troubled these pioneers little that
they were plunging into a sea of enemies. Society, with its
conventions and trammels, and most of all, perhaps, with its taxes,
was the only enemy whom they feared, the only one they could never
escape. But before it caught them up, their combats with corporeal
foes were incessant and deadly. Wild beasts prowled round their
herds; savages swooped upon their homesteads; all animated nature was
in arms against them; every farmhouse was a fortress, usually in a
state of siege. In the great spaces of the wilderness the cry for help
was but seldom heard, or if heard, only by one who had his own safety
to look to. The Boer farmer of the forties, therefore, had to work out
his rescue, as he worked out every other problem of his existence, for
himself, acquiring thereby, a supreme individuality and self-reliance
in the presence of danger. He acquired also other characteristics. The
fighting men of his nation were few in number; every mature life was
little less valuable to the State than it was to the homestead whose
existence depended upon it. The burgher's hope of injuring his enemy
was therefore subordinated to solicitude for his own preservation, and
he studied only safe methods of being dangerous. Even when in later
days the Boer expeditionary bands, reclaiming to the full from the
blacks the toll of blood and cruelty which had been levied on
themselves, were more often the attackers than the attacked, their
aggression was always tempered by the caution of the individual Boers,
who would still forego a chance of striking a blow should it contain
an undue element of hazard. The republic