ome native tribe, attending a few political
meetings, and the journeys he makes with his family to the nearest
town, some four times a year, in order to be present at "Nachtmaal"
or communion. Foreigners, especially Englishmen, he detests, but he is
kindly and hospitable to his own people. Living isolated as he does,
the lord of a little kingdom, he naturally comes to have a great idea of
himself, and a corresponding contempt for all the rest of mankind. Laws
and taxes are things distasteful to him, and he looks upon it as an
impertinence that any court should venture to call him to account for
his doings. He is rich and prosperous, and the cares of poverty, and all
the other troubles that fall to the lot of civilised men, do not affect
him. He has no romance in him, nor any of the higher feelings and
aspirations that are found in almost every other race; in short,
unlike the Zulu he despises, there is little of the gentleman in his
composition, though he is at times capable of acts of kindness and even
generosity. His happiness is to live alone in the great wilderness, with
his children, his men-servants and his maid-servants, his flocks and his
herds, the monarch of all he surveys. If civilisation presses him too
closely, his remedy is a simple one. He sells his farm, packs up his
goods and cash in his waggon, and starts for regions more congenially
wild. Such are some of the leading characteristics of that remarkable
product of South Africa, the Transvaal Boer, who resembles no other
white man in the world.

Perhaps, however, the most striking of all his oddities is his
abhorrence of all government, more especially if that government be
carried out according to English principles. The Boers have always been
more or less in rebellion; they rebelled against the rule of the Company
when the Cape belonged to Holland, they rebelled against the English
Government in the Cape, they were always in a state of semi-rebellion
against their own government in the Transvaal, and now they have for
the second time, with the most complete success, rebelled against the
English Government. The fact of the matter is that the bulk of their
number hate all Governments, because Governments enforce law and order,
and they hate the English Government worst of all, because it enforces
law and order most of all. It is not liberty they long for, but
license. The "sturdy independence" of the Boer resolves itself into a
determination not to have