e them
grave and serious, closely bound to their ancient forms of piety, and
prone to deem themselves the special objects of divine protection.

PART II

_A SKETCH OF SOUTH AFRICAN HISTORY_

CHAPTER VIII

THE NATIVES: HOTTENTOTS, BUSHMEN, AND KAFIRS

By far the most interesting features in the history of South Africa have
been the relations to one another of the various races that inhabit it.
There are seven of these races, three native and four European. The
European races, two of them, especially the Dutch and the English, are,
of course, far stronger, and far more important as political factors,
than are the natives. Nevertheless, the natives have an importance too,
and one so great that their position deserves to be fully set forth and
carefully weighed. For, though they are inferior in every point but one,
they are in that point strong. They are prolific. They already greatly
outnumber the whites, and they increase faster.

The cases of conflict or contact between civilized European man and
savage or semi-civilized aboriginal peoples, which have been very
numerous since the tide of discovery began to rise in the end of the
fifteenth century, may be reduced to three classes.

The first of these classes includes the cases where the native race,
though perhaps numerous, is comparatively weak, and unable to assimilate
European civilization, or to thrive under European rule (a rule which
has often been harsh), or even to survive in the presence of a European
population occupying its country. To this class belong such cases as the
extinction of the natives of the Antilles by the Spaniards, the
disappearance of the natives of Southern Australia and Tasmania before
British settlement, the dying out, or retirement to a few reserved
tracts, of the aborigines who once occupied all North America east of
the Rocky Mountains. The Russian advance in Siberia, the advance of
Spanish and Italian and German colonists in the territories of La Plata
in South America, may be added to this class, for though the phenomena
are rather those of absorption than of extinction, the result is
practically the same. The country becomes European and the native races
vanish.

An opposite class of cases arises where Europeans have conquered a
country already filled by a more or less civilized population, which is
so numerous and so prolific as to maintain itself with ease in their
presence. Such a case is the British conquest