barbarians than the savage natives of Caffraria." He had soon only too ample proofs of the correctness of his surmise. This fine race of people, who strikingly resemble the North American Indians in their character, their eloquence, their peculiar customs and traditions of Asiatic origin, have exactly resembled them in their fate. They have been driven out of their lands by the Europeans, and massacred by thousands when they have resented the invasion.
The Hottentots were exterminated, or reduced to thraldom, and the European colonists then came in contact with the Caffres, who were numerous and warlike, resisted aggression with greater effect, but still found themselves unable with their light assagais to contend with fire-arms, and were perpetually driven backwards with shocking carnage, and with circumstances of violent oppression which it is impossible to read of without the strongest indignation. Up to 1778 the Camtoos River had been considered the limit of the colony on that side; but at that period the Dutch governor, Van Plattenburgh, says Pringle, "in the course of an extensive tour into the interior, finding great numbers of colonists occupying tracts beyond the frontier, instead of recalling them within the legal limits, he extended the boundary (according to the ordinary practice of Cape governors before and since), adding, by a stroke of his pen, about 30,000 square miles to the colonial territory." The Great Fish River now became the boundary; which Lord Macartney in 1798, claiming all that Van Plattenburgh had so summarily claimed, confirmed.
It is singular how uniform are the policy and the modes of seizing upon native possessions by Euro-
