38 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH [ch. ii 



trekkers with the same names who led the hard-fighthig 

 farmers northward from the Cape seventy years ago, 

 and were kinsfolk of the men who since then have 

 made these names honourably known throughout the 

 world. There must, of course, be many Boers who 

 have gone backward under the stress of a hard and 

 semi-savage life ; just as in our communities of the 

 frontier, the backwoods, and the lonely mountains, there 

 are shiftless " poor whites " and " mean whites " mingled 

 with the stin'dy men and women who have laid deep the 

 foundations of our national greatness. But personally 

 I happened not to come across these shiftless " mean 

 white " Boers. Those that I met, both men and women, 

 were of as good a type as anyone could wish for in his 

 own countrymen or could admire in another nationality. 

 They fulfilled the three prime requisites for any race : 

 they worked hard, they could fight hard at need, and 

 they had plenty of cliildren. These are the three 

 essential qualities in any and every nation ; they are by 

 no means all-sufficient in themselves, and there is need 

 that many others should be added to them ; but the 

 lack of any one of them is fatal, and cannot be made 

 good by the presence of any other set of attributes. 



It was pleasant to see the good terms on v/hich Boer 

 and Briton met. Many of the English settlers whose 

 guest I was, or with whom I hunted — the Hills, Captain 

 Slatter, Heatley, Judd — had fought through the South 

 African War ; and so had all the Boers I met. The 

 latter had been for the most part members of various 

 particularly hard-fighting commandos ; when the war 

 closed they felt very bitterly, and wished to avoid living 

 under the British flag. Some moved west and some 

 east ; those I met were among the many hundreds, 

 indeed thousands, who travelled northward— a few over- 



