heir habitual suspicion makes them seek in
craft the defence for their ignorance of affairs; while their native
doggedness is confirmed by their belief in the continued guidance and
protection of that Providence whose hand led them through the wilderness
and gave them the victory over all their enemies.

This was the people into whose territory there came, after 1884, a
sudden swarm of gold-seekers. The Uitlanders, as these strangers are
called (the word is not really Dutch, one is told, but an adaptation
from the German), who by 1890 had come to equal and soon thereafter
exceeded the whole number of the Boers, belonged to many stocks. The
natives of England, the Cape, and Natal were the most numerous, but
there were also many English-speaking men from other regions, including
Australians and Americans, as well as a smaller number of Germans and
Scandinavians, some Russians (mostly Jews) and a few Italians and
Frenchmen. Unlike as these newcomers were to one another, they were all
still more unlike the rude hunting and pastoral people among whom they
came. They were miners, traders, financiers, engineers, keen,
nimble-minded men, all more or less skilled in their respective crafts,
all bent on gain, and most of them with that sense of irresponsibility
and fondness for temporary pleasure which a chanceful and uncertain
life, far from home, and relieved from the fear of public opinion, tends
to produce. Except some of the men from the two Colonies, they could not
speak the Boer _Taal_, and had no means of communication, any more than
they had social or moral affinities, with the folk of the land. There
were therefore no beginnings of any assimilation between them and the
latter. They did not affect the Boers, except with a sense of repulsion,
and still less did the Boers affect them. Moreover, there were few
occasions for social intercourse. The Uitlanders settled only along the
Witwatersrand, and were aggregated chiefly in Johannesburg. The Boers
who had lived on the Rand, except a few who came daily into the towns
with their waggons to sell milk and vegetables, retired from it. It was
only in Pretoria and in a few of the villages that there was any direct
social contact between the two elements.

Although less than half of the immigrants came from England, probably
five-sixths spoke English and felt themselves drawn together not only by
language, but by community of ideas and habits. The Australians, the
Americans, and