t to the
Portuguese, who first laid hold of South Africa, but to the races who
first entered the plateau at the point where it is nearest the sea, the
Dutch and the English. Coming a thousand miles by land, they have seized
and colonised the country that lies within sixty or eighty miles of the
ocean behind the Portuguese settlements, because they had good healthy
air to breathe during all those thousand miles of journey; while the
Portuguese, sunk among tropical swamps, were doing no more than maintain
their hold upon the coast, and were allowing even the few forts they had
established along the lower course of the Zambesi to crumble away.

The same natural conditions, however, which have made the plateau
healthy, have kept it sparsely peopled. Much of this high interior,
whose settlement has occupied the last sixty years, is a desert unfit,
and likely to be always unfit, for human habitation. Even in those parts
which are comparatively well watered, the grazing for sheep and cattle
is so scanty during some months of the year that farms are large, houses
are scattered far from one another, and the population remains extremely
thin. The Wilderness of the Karroo cuts off Cape Town and its
comparatively populous neighbourhood from the inhabited, though thinly
inhabited, pastoral districts of the Orange Free State. Between these
two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at
intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in
length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is
extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand,
because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles
out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while
the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these
comparatively low latitudes, its dryness has kept down their numbers and
has retarded not only their political development, but their progress in
all those arts and pursuits which imply a tolerably large and varied
society. The note of South African life, the thing that strikes the
traveller with increasing force as he visits one part of the country
after another, is the paucity of inhabitants, and the isolated life
which these inhabitants, except in six or seven towns, are forced to
lead. This is the doing of nature. She has not severed the country into
distinct social or political communities by any lines of physical
dem