to all
new light, imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament rather than of
the New. They dislike and despise the Kafirs, whom they have regarded as
Israel may have regarded Amalek, and whom they have treated with equal
severity. They hate the English also,[78] who are to them the hereditary
enemies that conquered them at the Cape; that drove them out into the
wilderness in 1836; that annexed their Republic in 1877, and thereafter
broke the promises of self-government made at the time of the
annexation; that stopped their expansion on the west by occupying
Bechuanaland, and on the north by occupying Matabililand and
Mashonaland; and that were still, as they believed, plotting to find
some pretext for overthrowing their independence.[79] This hatred is
mingled with a contempt for those whom they defeated at Laing's Nek and
Majuba Hill, and with a fear born of the sense that the English are
their superiors in knowledge, in activity, and in statecraft. It is
always hard for a nation to see the good qualities of its rivals and the
strong points of its opponents' case; but with the Boers the difficulty
is all the greater because they know little or nothing of the modern
world and of international politics. Two centuries of solitary pastoral
life have not only given them an aversion for commerce, for industrial
pursuits, and for finance, but an absolute incapacity for such
occupations, so that when gold was discovered in their country, they did
not even attempt to work it,[80] but were content to sell, usually for a
price far below its value, the land where the gold-reefs lay, and move
off with the proceeds to resume elsewhere their pastoral life. They have
the virtues appropriate to a simple society. They are brave,
good-natured, hospitable, faithful to one another, generally pure in
their domestic life, seldom touched by avarice or ambition. But the
corruption of their Legislature shows that it is rather to the absence
of temptation than to any superior strength of moral principle that
these merits have been due. For politics they have little taste or gift.
Politics can flourish only where people are massed together, and the
Boer is a solitary being who meets his fellows solely for the purposes
of religion or some festive gathering. Yet ignorant and slow-witted as
they are, inborn ability and resolution are not wanting. They have
indeed a double measure of wariness and wiliness in their intercourse
with strangers, because t