TREATMENT OF NATIVES BY BOERS. 37 



to sell themselves ; but never in any one case, within the mem- 

 ory of man, has a Bechuana chief sold any of his people, or a 

 Bechuana man his child. Hence the necessity for a foray to 

 seize children. And those individual Boers who would not en- 

 gage in it for the sake of slaves can seldom resist the two-fold 

 plea of a well-told story of an intended uprising of the devoted 

 tribe, and the prospect of handsome pay in the division of the 

 captured cattle besides. 



It is difficult for a person in a civilized country to conceive 

 that any body of men possessing the common attributes of hu- 

 manity (and these Boers are by no means destitute of the better 

 feelings of our nature) should with one accord set out, after load- 

 ing their own wives and children with caresses, and proceed to 

 shoot down in cold blood men and women, of a different color, 

 it is true, but possessed of domestic feelings and affections equal 

 to their own. I saw and conversed with children in the houses 

 of Boers who had, by their own and their masters' account, been 

 captured, and in several instances I traced the parents of these 

 unfortunates, though the plan approved by the long-headed among 

 the burghers is to take children so young that they soon forget 

 their parents and their native language also. It was long be- 

 fore I could give credit to the tales of bloodshed told by native 

 witnesses, and had I received no other testimony but theirs I 

 should probably have continued skeptical to this day as to the 

 truth of the accounts ; but when I found the Boers themselves, 

 some bewailing and denouncing, others glorying in the bloody 

 scenes in which they had been themselves the actors, I was com- 

 pelled to admit the validity of the testimony, and try to account 

 for the cruel anomaly. They are all traditionally religious, trac- 

 ing their descent from some of the best men (Huguenots and 

 Dutch) the world ever saw. Hence they claim to themselves the 

 title of " Christians," and all the colored race are " black proper- 

 ty" or " creatures." They being the chosen people of God, the 

 heathen are given to them for an inheritance, and they are the 

 rod of divine vengeance on the heathen, as were the Jews of old. 

 Living in the midst of a native population much larger than 

 themselves, and at fountains removed many miles from each oth- 

 er, they feel somewhat in the same insecure position as do the 

 Americans in the Southern States. The first question put by 



