was due rather to
circumstance than to conscious purpose. A monarch they could not have,
because there was no one designated for the place, as well as because
they had the instinct of general disobedience. But for a long time they
tried to rub along with no more government or leadership than the needs
of war required. Seldom has any people been so little influenced by
abstract political ideas, yet seldom has a people enjoyed so perfect an
opportunity of trying political experiments and testing the theories of
political philosophers. But the Boers were, and are still, a strictly
practical people. Their houses give them cover from sun and rain, but
nothing more; there is little comfort and no elegance. So their
institutions were the fewest and simplest under which men have ever
governed themselves. It is therefore no theoretical attachment to
democracy that has helped the Boers to resist the English; it is merely
the wish to be left alone, and a stubbornness of will that made
independence seem more desirable the more it was threatened.

Even this admirable stubbornness would hardly have carried them through
but for the dispersion over vast spaces. That dispersion, while it
retarded their political growth and social progress, made them hard to
reach or to conquer. The British Government despaired of over-taking and
surrounding them, for they were scattered like antelopes over the lonely
veldt, and there was a still vaster and equally lonely veldt behind them
into which they could retire. To pursue them seemed a wild-goose chase,
and a costly one, in which there was much to spend and little to gain.
Thus their weakness has proved their strength, and the more settled they
become in the future, the less can they hope to escape the influences
they have so long resisted.

But for the maintenance of the sentiment of Boer nationality by the two
Boer Republics, the antagonism of Dutch and English in Cape Colony would
have ere now died out, for there has been little or nothing in colonial
politics to sustain it. The interests of the farmers of both stocks are
identical, their rights are in all respects the same, and the British
Government has been perfectly impartial. The Boers in the Colony are
good citizens and loyal subjects. It is only the character of the
country and the conditions of their pastoral life that have retarded
their social fusion with the English, as it is only the passions aroused
by the strife of Boers and Eng