as permitted to remain, and it is
to-day the common law of all the British colonies and territories, as
well as of the Boer Republics, in South Africa. Intermarriage began, and
the social relations of the few English who had come in after 1806, with
the many Dutch were friendly. In 1820 the British government sent out
about five thousand emigrants from England and Scotland, who settled in
the thinly occupied country round Algoa Bay on the eastern border of the
Colony; and from that time on there was a steady, though never copious,
influx of British settlers, through whose presence the use of the
English language increased, together with a smaller influx of Germans,
who soon lost their national individuality and came to speak either
English or the local Dutch.

Before long, however, this fair promise of peace and union was
overclouded, and the causes which checked the fusion of the races in the
Colony, and created two Dutch Republics beyond its limits, have had such
momentous results that they need to be clearly stated.

The first was to be found in the character of the Dutch population. They
were farmers, a few dwelling in villages and cultivating the soil, but
the majority stock-farmers, living scattered over a wide expanse of
country, for the thinness of the pasture had made and kept the
stock-farms very large. They saw little of one another, and nothing of
those who dwelt in the few towns which the Colony possessed. They were
ignorant, prejudiced, strongly attached to their old habits, impatient
of any control. The opportunities for intercourse between them and the
British were thus so few that the two races acquired very little
knowledge of one another, and the process of social fusion, though easy
at Capetown and wherever else the population was tolerably dense, was
extremely slow over the country at large. A deplorable incident which
befell on the eastern border in 1815 did much to create bad blood. A
slight rising, due to the attempted arrest of a farmer on a charge of
maltreating his native servant, broke out there. It was soon suppressed,
but of the prisoners taken six were condemned to death and five were
hanged. This harsh act, which was at the time justified as a piece of
"necessary firmness," produced wide-spread and bitter resentment, and
the mention of Slagter's Nek continued for many years to awaken an
outburst of anti-British feeling among the Boers.

A second cause was the unwisdom of the British aut