the traveller--that no
other British Colony has compressed so much exciting history into the
last sixty or seventy years. The reason is undoubtedly to be found in
the circumstance that South Africa has had two sets of race questions to
deal with: questions between the whites and the aborigines, questions
between the Dutch and the English. It is this latter set of questions
that have been the main thread of South African annals. Why have they
proved so troublesome? Why are they so troublesome to-day, when we ought
to be able to look at them with a vision enlarged and a temper mellowed
by wide experience? Partly from an element inherent in all race
questions. They are not questions that can be settled on pure business
lines, by an adjustment of the material interests of the parties
concerned. They involve sentiment, and thus, like questions of religion,
touch the deeper springs of emotion. And they spring from, or are
involved with, incompatibilities of character which prevent the men of
either stock from fully understanding, and therefore fully trusting, the
men of the other. Suspicion, if not positive aversion, makes it
difficult for two races to work together, even where the political
arrangements that govern their relations are just and reasonable. But
something may also be ascribed to certain malign accidents which blasted
the prospect, once fair, of a friendly fusion between the Dutch and the
English peoples that seemed eminently fit to be fused. The British
annexation of Cape Colony occurred at an unfortunate time. Had it
happened thirty years earlier no difficulties would have arisen over the
natives and slavery, because at that time the new philanthropy had not
begun to influence English opinion or the British Government. Had it
happened in later days, when steam had given quicker and more frequent
ocean communication, Britain and the Colony would each have better known
what the other thought and wished, and the errors that alienated the
Boers might never have been committed. The period which followed the
annexation was precisely the period in which the differences between
English feeling and colonial feeling were most marked and most likely to
lead to misunderstanding and conflict.

For there has been in the antagonism of the Boers and the English far
more than the jealousy of two races. There has been a collision of two
types of civilisation, one belonging to the nineteenth century, the
other to the seventeenth