pardoned for the ill will with which they accepted the change. And this becomes the more clear to us when we remember that slavery was at the time still an institution of the country, and that the slaves, who were an imported people from the Straits and the Guinea Coast, were at any rate equal in intelligence to the Hottentots.
Six years afterwards, in 1834, slavery itself was abolished in all lands subject to the British flag,—and this created even a greater animosity among the Dutch than the enactments in favour of the Hottentots. Perhaps no one thing has so strongly tended to alienate the Boer from us as this measure and the way in which it was carried out. In the first place the institution of slavery recommended itself entirely to the Dutch mind. Taking him altogether we shall own that he was not a cruel slave owner; but he was one to whom slavery of itself was in no way repugnant. That he as the master should have a command of labour seemed to him to be only natural. To throw away this command for the sake of putting the slave into a condition which,—as the Dutchman thought,—would be worse for the slave himself was to him an absurdity. He regarded the matter as we regard the doctrine of equality. The very humanitarianism of it was to him a disgusting pretence. The same feeling exists still. It strikes one at every corner in the Colony. A ready mode to comfort, wealth, and general prosperity was, as the Dutchman thinks,—and also some who are not Dutch,—absolutely thrown away. Then came the question of compensation. Some of us are old enough to remember the difficulty in distributing the twenty millions which were voted for the
