48 AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 



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 any one could wish for 

 in his own countrymen or could admire in another nation- 

 ality. They fulfilled the three prime requisites for any 

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

 they had plenty of children. 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 which 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 overland, most of them by water to German East 

 Africa. But in the part in which they happened to settle 

 they were decimated by fever, and their stock perished of 

 cattle sickness; and most of them had again moved north- 

 ward, and once more found themselves under the British 

 flag. They were being treated precisely on an equality with 

 the British settlers; and every well-wisher to his kind, and 

 above all every well-wisher to Africa, must hope that the 

 men who in South Africa fought so valiantly against one 

 another, each for the right as he saw it, will speedily grow 

 into a companionship of mutual respect, regard, and con- 

 sideration such as that which, for our inestimable good fort- 

 une, now knits closely together in our own land the men 

 who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray and 

 their descendants. There could be no better and manlier 



