e, but also to the temper of the people, and their thin
dispersion over a vast territory. In large town populations excitement
grows by the sympathy of numbers, but South Africa has only five or six
towns in which a public meeting of even three hundred citizens could be
gathered. The Dutch are tardy, cautious and reserved. The doggedness of
their ancestors who resisted Philip II. of Spain lives in them still.
They have a slow tenacious intensity, like that of a forest fire, which
smoulders long among the prostrate trunks before it bursts into flame.
But they are, except when deeply stirred, conservative and slow to move.
They dislike change so much as to be unwilling to change their
representatives or their ministers. A Cape statesman told me that the
Dutch members of the Assembly would often say to him: "We think you
wrong in this instance, and we are going to vote against you, but we
don't want to turn you out; stay on in office as before." So President
Kruger observed to me, in commenting on the frequent changes of
government in England: "When we have found an ox who makes a good leader
of the team, we keep him there, instead of shifting the cattle about in
the hope of finding a better one;" and in saying this he expressed the
feelings and habits of his race. To an Englishman the Dutch seem to want
that interest in politics for the sake of politics which marks not only
the English (and still more the Irish) at home but also the English
stock in North America and Australia. But this very fact makes them all
the more fierce and stubborn when some issue arises which stirs their
inmost mind, and it is a fact to be remembered by those who have to
govern them. The things they care most about are their religion, their
race ascendency over the blacks, and their Dutch-African nationality as
represented by their kinsfolk in the two Republics. The first of these
has never been tampered with; the two latter have been at the bottom of
all the serious difficulties that have arisen between them and the
English. That which was in 1897 exciting them and forming the crucial
issue in Cape politics was the strained condition of things which
existed in the Transvaal. I propose in the following chapter to explain
how that condition came about, and to sketch its salient features.

[Footnote 76: There are for the Council seven electoral provinces, each
of which returns three members to the Council, besides one for
Griqualand West and one for