. His isolation, not only in a distant corner
of the southern hemisphere, but in the great, wide, bare veldt over
which his flocks and herds roam, has kept the Boer fast bound in the
ideas and habits of a past age, and he shrinks from the contact of the
keen restless modern man, with new arts of gain and new forms of
pleasure, just as a Puritan farmer of Cromwell's day might shrink were
he brought to life and forced to plunge into the current of modern
London. Had the Boers been of English stock, but subjected to the same
conditions as those which kept the seventeenth century alive in the
country behind the Cape, they too would have resisted the new ways of
the new rulers; but their identity of race and speech with those rulers
would have abridged the struggle. It is the fact that the old Cape
settlers had a language of their own, and a sense of blood-kinship to
hold them together that has enabled the Dutch element to remain
cohesive, and given them an Afrikander patriotism of their own--a
patriotism which is not Dutch, for they care nothing for the traditions
of Holland, but purely Africander.

Their local position as half-nomadic inhabitants of a wide interior gave
a peculiar character to that struggle between the mother country and her
colonists which has arisen more than once in British history. They were
so few and so poor, as compared with the people of the thirteen Colonies
of the North American coast in 1776, that it was useless for them to
rebel and fight for independence, as those Colonies had done. On the
other hand, they were not, like the French of lower Canada, rooted in
the soil as agriculturists. Hence a middle course between rebellion and
submission offered itself. That course was secession. They renounced not
only their political allegiance, but even the very lands where they
dwelt, seeking the protection of the desert as other emigrants before
them had sought that of the ocean. Thus again, and more completely,
isolated since 1836, the emigrant Boers, and especially those of the
Transvaal, have been able to retain their old ways for sixty years
longer, and have grown more anti-English than ever. On the other hand,
the English of the Colony, whose English sentiment was quickened by
these events, have remained more thoroughly English than those of most
British Colonies, and have never conceived the idea of severing their
own connection with the mother country.

That the emigrant Boers became republicans