22 TREATMENT OF NATIVES BY BOERS. 



remedies to their sick, without money and without price. 

 It is due to them to state that I was invariably treated 

 with respect ; but it is most unfortunate that they 

 should have been left by their own Church for so many 

 years to deteriorate and become as degraded as the blacks, 

 whom the stupid prejudice against colour leads them to 

 detest. 



This new species of slavery which they have adopted 

 serves to supply the lack of field-labour only. The 

 demand for domestic servants must be met by forays on 

 tribes which have good supplies of cattle. The Portuguese 

 can quote instances in which blacks become so degraded 

 by the love of strong drink as actually to sell themselves ; 

 but never in any one case, within the memory 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 

 engage 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 civilised country to con- 

 ceive that any body of men possessing the common attri- 

 butes of humanity (and these Boers are by no means 

 destitute of the better feelings of our nature) should with 

 one accord set out, after loading their own wives and 

 children with caresses, and proceed to shoot down in 

 cold blood men and women, of a different colour, 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 

 before 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 sceptical 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 



