Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

77 страница из 115

We come now to a second small point, to be noted as bearing on the development of the Boer.

The commanders of the early settlement gave out to certain of their men portions of land on the peninsula, to be cultivated for their own and the Company's benefit. These men built huts, planted and sowed. Thirty years after Van Riebeek landed there were two hundred and ninety-three white men in the settlement, but only eighty-eight white women, and the men on their little allotments grumbled for want of wives. The directors of the Dutch East India Company conferred, and it was determined to send out from certain orphan asylums in Holland respectable girls to supply this want; and from time to time, ships brought small numbers. The soldiers and the sailors at the Cape welcomed them gladly; they were all speedily married and settled in their homes at the foot of Table Mountain.

It may appear fanciful, but we believe it is not so, to suppose that this small incident throws a sidelight on one of the leading characteristics of the African Boer. For the South African Boer differs from every other emigrant branch of a European people whom we can recall, either in classical or modern times, in this: that having settled in a new land, and not having mixed with the aboriginal inhabitants, nor accepted their language, he has yet severed every intellectual and emotional tie between himself and the parent lands from which he sprang. The Greek, whether he settled in Asia Minor or Sicily, though economically and politically independent, was still a Greek; an uncut cord of intellectual and emotional sympathy still bound him to the mother country; and after two hundred years the inhabitant of Syracuse or Ephesus was still a Greek of the Greeks; bound not only to Greece as a whole, but to that particular state from which he sprang; among the most immortal and typical of Grecian names are those of men not born in the parent home of the race, but in its colonies. The modern Australian, Canadian, Yankee, or even American Spaniard, if of unmixed European blood, turns still to Europe as Home. Political differences may have had to be settled in blood, and commercial interests may divide, but, emotionally and intellectually, the bond which binds a European colonist to the home from which he sprang, and to Europe as a whole, is an operative fact. The Boer has had no great conflict with his parent peoples in Europe; he has not lost his race by mingling it with the barbarous people among whom he settled; yet he is as much severed from the lands of his ancestors and from Europe, as though three thousand instead of two hundred years had elapsed since he left it.