fought under Chaka the king of the Zulus;-but had quarrelled with his lord and master and fled out of Zulu Land westwards. Here he seems to have created the tribe called Matabele, some of whom were Zulus and some natives and some warriors who had joined him, as being a great fighting Chief, from other tribes. He was as terrible a savage as Chaka himself, and altogether "ate up" the less warlike Bechuanas who up to his time possessed the land thereabouts. This seems to have been the way with these tribes. They were like water running furiously in a torrent which in its course is dashed over a rock. The stream is scattered into infinite spray the particles of which can hardly be distinguished from the air. But it falls again and is collected into this stream or the other, changing not its nature but only its name. The Zulus, the Bechuanas, the Matabeles, and the Kafirs seem to have been formed and reformed after this fashion without any long dated tribal consistency among them. When the Dutch came to the Vaal river, groping their way to Natal, they found Mazulekatze and his Matabeles who was still at war with some of these Bechuana tribes south of the Vaal river. This was in 1837, the year before the final abolition of slavery which by the law of 1834 was arranged to take place in 1838. The Dutch were nearly exterminated, but they succeeded in driving Mazulekatze out of the land. Then there was a quarrel among themselves whether they should remain in that land or go eastward, to the more promising soil of Natal. They went eastward, and how they fared in Natal has already been told. For ten or eleven years after this the "trekking" of the Dutchmen into the Transvaal was only the onward movement of the most hardy of the class, the advanced pioneers of freedom, who would prefer to live on equal terms with the Savage, if that were necessary,—than to have any dealings with English law. These were men at that time subject to no rule. Some were established north and west of the Vaal where Potchefstrom and Klerksdorp now are; others south and east of the Vaal. As to the latter there came an order for the appointment over them of British magistrates from Sir Henry Smith who was then the Governor of the Cape Colony. This was an offence which could not be borne. Andreas Pretorius, that most uncompromising, most stiff-necked and self-reliant of all the Dutchmen, had left Natal in disgust with this Governor and had settled himself in these parts. He instigated a rebellion against British authority,—not with the view of at that moment claiming land north of the Vaal, but of asserting the independence of those who lived to the south of it. Then came the battle of Boom Plaats and the Orange Sovereignty,—as will be told in the section of my Work devoted to the history of the Orange Free State. It was when flying from this battle, in 1848, that Pretorius crossed the Vaal. "For you there is safety," he said to his companions as he started. "For me there is none." Then he fled away across the river and a reward of £2,000 was set upon his head. This I think may be regarded as the beginning of the occupation of the Transvaal territory by a European or Dutch population. A sort of Republic was at once established of which Pretorius was at first the acknowledged rather than the elected Chief. The most perfect freedom for the white man,—which was supposed to include perfect equality,— was to be maintained by a union of their forces against the Natives of the country. Mazulekatze had been ejected, and the Bechuanas were again coming in upon their old land. Then there were new troubles which seemed always to end in the subjection of a certain number of the Natives to the domestic institutions of the Dutch. The children of those who rebelled, and who were taken as prisoners, were bound as apprentices in the families of the Dutch farmers, and as such were used as slaves. There can be no doubt that such was the case. All the evidence that there is on the subject goes to prove it, and the practice was one entirely in accordance with Dutch sympathies and Dutch manners. It is often pointed out to an enquirer that the position of the little urchins who were thus brought into contact with civilization was thereby much improved. Such an argument cannot be accepted as worth anything until the person using it is brought to admit that the child so apprenticed is a slave, and the master a slave-owner. Then the argument is brought back to the great question whether slavery as an institution is beneficial or the reverse. But even a Dutchman will generally avoid that position. Such was the condition of the territory when the English determined that they would signify to their runaway subjects that they were regarded as free to manage themselves as they pleased across the Vaal. Of what use could it be to follow these Dutchmen beyond that distant river, when, if so persecuted, they would certainly "trek" beyond the Limpopo? Further back than the Limpopo were the Zambesi and the Equator. And yet as matters then stood a certain unpronounced claim was implied by what had been done between the Orange and the Vaal. A treaty was therefore made with the people in 1852, and for the making of the treaty Messrs. Hogge and Owen were despatched as Her Majesty's Commissioners to meet Pretorius and a deputation of emigrant farmers, to settle the terms on which the Republic should be established. There were two clauses of special interest. One prohibited slavery in the new Republic,-a clause so easy to put into a treaty, but one of which it is so impossible for an outside power to exact the fulfilment! Another declared that the British would make no alliances with the natives north of the Vaal river,—a clause which we have also found to be very inconvenient. It would have been better perhaps merely to have told these Boers that if we found slavery to exist we should make it a casus belli, and to have bound ourselves to nothing. This would have been "high-handed," but then how much more high-handed have we been since? Andreas Pretorius was the first President of the now established and recognised nationality which, with a weak ambition which has assisted much in bringing it to its ruin, soon called itself the South African Republic,—as though it were destined to swallow up not only the Free State but the British Colonies also. In this, however, Andreas Pretorius himself had no part. The passion of his soul seems to have been separation from the British; -not dominion over them. He died within two years, in July 1853, and his son was elected in his place. The father was certainly a remarkable man,—the one who of all his class was the most determined to liberate himself from the thraldom of English opinions. Mr. Theal in his history of South Africa well describes how this man had become what he was by a continued reading of the Old Testament. The sanguinary orders given to the chosen people of the Lord were to him orders which he was bound to obey as were they. Mr. Theal quotes a special passage from the twentieth chapter of Deutero * nomy, to which I will refer my reader-"When thou *Vol. II. p. 164. The Israelites comest nigh unto a city fight against it." are enjoined either to slay or to enslave. felt that such were the commands given to him in reference to those natives among whom his lot had cast him. They were to him the people of the cities which were "very far off," and whom he had divine order to enslave, while the more unfortunate ones who would still fain occupy the lands on which it suited him and his people to dwell, were "the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites" whom the Lord had commanded him utterly to destroy. With such authority before him, and while black labour was so necessary to the cultivation of the land, how could he doubt about slavery? In studying the peculiarity of the Dutch character in South Africa and the aversion of the people to our ways we have always to remember tha they had been brought up for ages in the strictest belief in the letter of scripture. The very pictures in their bibles were to them true pictures, because they were there. It was so two hundred years ago with a large sect in Europe,—from which sect they had sprung. They had grown in the new land without admixture with the progressing ideas of Europe. They had neither been enlightened nor contaminated by new systems of belief, or unbelief. So it has come to pass that an institution which is so abhorrent to us as to make us feel that the man who is stained by it must be a godless sinner, is still to them a condition of things directly authorized and ordered by the Almighty. By our persistency, by our treaties, by our power, by enforcing upon their inferior condition as the very trade-mark of our superiority the command that slavery shall exist no longer, we have driven them to deny it, and have almost convinced them that slavery is no longer possible. But that heartfelt |