settlers. Naturally inclined, already, to utilize natives for any work of a manual nature, this official encouragement immediately complicated the relations between Hottentots and Bushmen and the Dutch farmers. The latter, having once tasted the pleasures of slave-ownership in the midst of vast reserves of dark-skinned people, soon put the principle into the fullest practice and application. From time to time further consignments of slaves from other parts of Africa were introduced by those inveterate dealers, the Portuguese, and to them were soon added large numbers of native criminals from Malacca, Java and the Spice Islands, who were sent by the Batavian Government to serve out terms of punishment or slavery at the Cape. They were, of course, more intelligent than the imported slaves from Guinea and Mozambique, and often made excellent masons, harness-makers, coopers and tailors; but their influence upon the moral tone of the white community amongst whom they were placed is not hard to estimate. From their arrival dates one of the many mixed races with which South Africa swarms. Another class of imported Asiatics of a higher type consisted of political offenders sent from Java at a later date to live, with their families, upon fixed Government allowances. They received occasional accessions up to 1781, when the last batch came out. As a result of these successive racial importations Cape Colony came in time to include a most singular and varied half-breed population in which Dutch and Hottentots and Malay and Negro were all intermixed.

European Population in 1759

In 1759, a century and a half after the Colony was established, its population contained 9,782 Europeans, of whom 1,486 were women and 8,104 slaves. How many natives there were it is difficult to estimate, as they were always a very movable quantity. Up to the end of the century this population lived and slowly increased under conditions which absolutely precluded real progress and evolved the character of singular stagnation which met the English conquerors in 1795. In 1779 the Dutch settlers pleaded in vain with the Directors of the East India Company for a limited privilege of making purchases directly in Holland instead of through the Company's stores at Cape Town. In vain the so-called burghers also asked for the most elementary political rights—though even then entirely unwilling to concede any rights to the surrounding natives. In vain they petitioned for printed copies of the laws and regulations of the Government and for a printing press.

They were regarded at this time by the Batavian Government much as the Transvaal authorities regarded the Uitlanders of another century. The Law Officer of the Cape Government, to whom the petitions were referred in 1779 by the Home authorities, declared that: "It would be a mere waste of words to dwell on the remarkable distinction to be drawn between burghers whose ancestors nobly fought for and conquered their freedom and such as are named burghers here, who have been permitted as matter of grace to have a residence in a land of which possession has been taken by the Sovereign Power, there to gain a livelihood as tillers of the earth, tailors and shoemakers."[1] At the end of the nineteenth century the Uitlanders believed themselves to have been taxed and treated in the Transvaal with very much similar motives and entirely from the point of view of Dutch revenues and the strengthening of Dutch supremacy. The Boers had been well taught this peculiar lesson in government, and nowhere better than in another part of this same document: "Now it is clear, and requires no lengthy argument, that for the purpose of enabling a subordinate Colony to flourish as a Colony it is not always expedient to apply those means which, considered in the abstract, might be conducive to its prosperity. The object of paramount importance in legislating for Colonies should be the welfare of the parent state, of which such Colony is but a subordinate part and to which it owes its existence."

[1] Three Lectures on the Cafe of Good Hope, Judge Watermeyer. Cape Town, 1857.

The Afrikander Dialect

Meanwhile, to the degradation of character which came from the possession of slaves by a people naturally narrow in view and necessarily ignorant through their unfortunate environment, was added the creation and cultivation of a curious patois, or Afrikander dialect, which increased their isolation and intensified the problems of the future. The Huguenots had been compelled to learn and to speak Dutch, and probably did not do it very well; the Boers were themselves compelled to frequently speak the language of the natives; there was no school system and no sifting of the culture of a higher class of permanent residents down through the grades of other settlers; there was no emigration of population from Holland which might have helped to maintain the morale of the language; and the result was the evolution of a dialect which became neither Dutch nor French, nor native, but a mixture of all three called the Taal. Olive Schreiner has given the following explanation and description[2] of this product of seventeenth century evolution amongst the Boers:

"The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the Taal has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections and have been otherwise clipped.... Of the commonest pronouns many are corrupted out of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of Dutch extraction most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable. A few words are from Malay and other native sources; but so sparse is the vocabulary and so broken are its forms that it is impossible in the Taal to express a subtle emotion, an abstract conception, or a wide generalization."

[2] The Story of South Africa. By W. Basil Worsfold, M.A. London, 1898.

The Batavian Republic

In 1792 a Commission came out from Holland to investigate the affairs and government of the now decadent and bankrupt Company; and shortly afterwards the widespread colonial system of that famous organization was taken over by the Home Government of Holland, or, as it became under French influence, the Batavian Republic. Minor reforms were introduced at the Cape, but they were not sufficient to meet the current conditions of corruption and stagnation, and by 1795, when Cape Town capitulated to Admiral Elphinstone and General Craig, during one of the varied phases of the Napoleonic wars and European combinations against England, much of the interior Colony was in a state of rebellion, and two little republics had been established amongst the settlers away to the north and east of the capital. Thus ended a system of Government which the late Judge Watermeyer, of Cape Town, has declared was "in all things political purely despotic; in all things commercial purely monopolistic;" and which the Historiographer to the Cape Government has summarized in the words:[