land, for they were few in number and all they
wanted was to be found close at hand. But they built themselves houses,
and they supplied the Dutch East India Company with food and water,
gradually budding off little townlets, Wynberg, Stellenbosch, and
pushing their settlements up the long slopes which lead to that great
central plateau which extends for fifteen hundred miles from the edge
of the Karoo to the Valley of the Zambesi. Then came the additional
Huguenot emigrants--the best blood of France three hundred of them, a
handful of the choicest seed thrown in to give a touch of grace and soul
to the solid Teutonic strain. Again and again in the course of history,
with the Normans, the Huguenots, the Emigres, one can see the great hand
dipping into that storehouse and sprinkling the nations with the same
splendid seed. France has not founded other countries, like her great
rival, but she has made every other country the richer by the mixture
with her choicest and best. The Rouxs, Du Toits, Jouberts, Du Plessis,
Villiers, and a score of other French names are among the most familiar
in South Africa.

For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the
gradual spreading of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld which
lay to the north of them. Cattle raising became an industry, but in
a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms are
necessary for even small herds. Six thousand acres was the usual size,
and five pounds a year the rent payable to Government. The diseases
which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and Australia,
been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox cleared the
country for the newcomers. Further and further north they pushed,
founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and
Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale
of the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered
dwellings. Already the settlers were showing that independence of
control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most
prominent characteristic. Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an older
but weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to revolt.
The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal cataclysm
which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years, during which
the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between England and France
in the final counting up of t