certain Dutch possessions in South America the sum of L6,000,000.

The European population of the Colony, which was thus finally
transferred to the rule of a foreign though a cognate nation, consisted
in 1806 of about 27,000 persons, mostly of Dutch, with a smaller number
of German or French descent. They had some 30,000 black slaves, and of
the aboriginal Hottentots about 17,000 remained. Nearly all spoke Dutch,
or rather the rude local dialect into which the Dutch of the original
settlers (said to have been largely Frieslanders), had degenerated. The
descendants of the Huguenots had long since lost their French.

No people find it agreeable to be handed over to the government of a
different race, and the British administration in the Colony in those
days was, though restrained by the general principles of English law,
necessarily autocratic, because representative institutions had never
existed at the Cape. Still things promised well for the peace and
ultimate fusion of the Dutch and English races. They were branches of
the same Low-German stock, separated by fourteen hundred years of
separate history, but similar in the fundamental bases of their
respective characters. Both were attached to liberty, and the British
had indeed enjoyed at home a much fuller measure of it than had the
Dutch in the settled parts of the Colony. Both professed the Protestant
religion, and the Dutch were less tolerant toward Roman Catholics than
the English. The two languages retained so much resemblance that it was
easy for an Englishman to learn Dutch and for a Dutchman to learn
English. An observer might have predicted that the two peoples would
soon, by intercourse and by intermarriage, melt into one, as Dutch and
English had done in New York. For a time it seemed as if this would
certainly come to pass. The first two British governors were men of high
character, whose administration gave little ground for complaint to the
old inhabitants. The Company's restrictions on trade had been abolished,
and many reforms were introduced by the new rulers. Schools were
founded, the administration of justice was reorganised under new courts,
the breed of cattle and horses was improved, the slave-trade was
forbidden, and missions to the natives were largely developed. Meanwhile
local institutions were scarcely altered, and the official use of the
Dutch language was maintained. The Roman-Dutch law, which had been in
force under the Company's rule, w