to it by many ties, nor, like the English settlers in the New
England colonies, men of good education and serious temper, seeking the
freedom to worship God in their own way. They came from the humbler
classes, and partly because they had few home ties, partly because the
voyage to Holland was so long that communication with it was difficult,
they maintained little connection with the mother country and soon lost
their feeling for it. The Huguenot immigrants were more cultivated, and
socially superior to the rude adventurers who had formed the bulk of the
Dutch settlers, but they had of course no home country to look to.
France had cast them out; Holland was alien in blood and speech. So it
befell that of all the colonists that Europe had sent forth since the
voyage of Columbus, the South African whites were those who soonest lost
their bond with Europe, and were the first set of emigrants to feel
themselves a new people, whose true home lay in the new land they had
adopted. Thus early in South African annals were the foundations laid of
what we now call the Africander sentiment--a sentiment which has become
one of the main factors in the history of the country.

Nor was this all. When the comparatively small area of fertile land
which could be cultivated without irrigation had been taken up, the
keeping of cattle suggested itself as an easy means of livelihood. The
pasture, however, was so thin that it was necessary to graze the cattle
over wide stretches of ground, and the farther they went into the
interior the scantier was the pasture and the larger therefore did the
area of land become over which a farmer let his oxen or sheep run. This
process of extending cattle-farms--if farms they can be called--over the
interior was materially accelerated through the destruction of the
nearer Hottentot tribes by the frightful outbreak of smallpox which
begun in A.D. 1713, followed by another not less virulent in 1755. The
Europeans suffered severely from it, the negroes, slave and free, still
more, but the Hottentots most of all. In fact, it cleared them away from
all the southern and western parts of the Colony and left these regions
open to Europeans. Only the Bushmen remained, whose more solitary life
gave them comparative immunity from contagion. Thus from the beginning
of the eighteenth century, and during the whole of it, there was a
constant dispersion of settlers from the old nucleus into the
circumjacent wilderness. T