146 SOUTH AFRICAN AGRICULTURE: AX ANALYSIS. 



commerce to many parts of the globe, and were imbued with a 

 colonising spirit. I refer, of course, to the Dutch of the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And not only was this 

 new country vast, but it was also a fair, a most attractive land. 

 All who know what is now called the South-Western districts 

 could easily realise how great must have been the call of the 

 magnilicent mountain ranges, the well-watered valleys, the 

 immense stretches of cultivable land, the certain and adequate 

 rainfall and the glorious climate, to the early settlers and their 

 descendants and to the Huguenot refugees — men with the spirit 

 of pioneering, the instinct of freedom, and the courage of inde- 

 j)endence. To so small a population the land was limitless, and 

 distance from the only market necessitated that they should be, 

 as far as possible, inde]:)endent for their livelihood of the town 

 population ; and so, to a large extent, they became their own 

 blacksmiths, their own carpenters, their own l)uilders, their own 

 harnessmakers, their own farriers, their own booimakers, their 

 own handymen. Occupation of the land extended inland, and 

 gradually spread to distant parts of the Cape. When, in the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century, the Cape of Good Hope 

 was definitelv annexed by F.ngland, and a new rule was imposed 

 on the country, there was a human ])roduct in this land such as I 

 have tried to sketch — one that loved to be free, and did not fear 

 to rely upon its own right hand, its own strength of character, 

 and its own resourcefulness. This human product, no longer 

 wholly Dutch or French, but doubtless in the space of a century 

 and a half changed by its environment, though still retaining 

 largely the characteristics of its ancestors, chafed under the 

 new rule ; and, thirty years after British occupation, the Great 

 Trek commenced — an undertaking which the environment of 

 this older section of the people made j^ossible. In course of 

 time this country, now the Union of South Africa, with an area 

 of, roughly, 477,000 sc|uare miles, became occupied from end to 

 end by a very small Juiropean poi)ulation, the rural section 

 being owners of large farms, removed from the advantages of 

 good education and of easy intercourse, and having a limited 

 market for their produce and their live-stock. Here. then, was 

 produced in the main, in the course of two centuries, a situation 

 the exact reverse of what was recjuired for the advancement of 

 agriculture : instead of small holdings intensively cidtivated were 

 Parge farms hardly cultivated at all, and used chiefly for the 

 rearing of herds of cattle and flocks of sheep ; instead of 

 proximitv to large markets, rapid transport, much intercourse 

 and good education, were distant markets, slow wagon trans- 

 port. infre(|uent association, and scarcely anv education. So we 

 are impelled to the conclusion that, while the (jualities required 

 for i)rogress in agriculture were always and are possessed by 

 the South African farmer, political and other considerations 

 dispersed his activities over so great an area that for generations 

 production languished. 



It was inevitable, moreover, that native wars^ and different 

 aspirations of the white races, should absorb a vast amount of 



