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COLONIZATION

Of the same, or a kindred race with the Hottentots, are the Bosjesmen, or Bushmen, and the Griquas; their treatment, except that they could not be made slaves of, has been the same. The same injustice, the same lawlessness, the same hostile irritation, have been practised towards them by the Dutch and English as towards the Hottentots. The bushmen, in fact, were Hottentots, who, disdaining slavery and resenting the usurpations of the Europeans on their lands, took arms, endeavoured to repel their aggressors, and finding that impracticable, fled to the woods and the mountains; others, from time to time escaping from intolerable thraldom, joined them. These bushmen carried on a predatory warfare from their fastnesses with the oppressors of their race, and were in return hunted as wild beasts. Commandoes, a sort of military battu, were set on foot against them. Every one knows what a battu for game is. The inhabitants of a district assemble at the command of an officer, civil or military, to clear the country of wild beasts. They take in a vast circle, beating up the bushes and thickets, while they gradually contract the circle, till the whole multitude find themselves inclosing a small area filled with the whole bestial population of the neighbourhood, on which they make a simultaneous attack, and slaughter them in one promiscuous mass. A commando is a very similar thing, except that in it not only the bestial population of the country, but the human too, are slaughtered by the inhuman. These commandoes, though they have only acquired at the Cape a modern notoriety, have been used from the first day of discovery. They were common in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and under the same name,