548 
THE CAFFRE AND HOTTENTOT RACES. 
different chiefs possessed a power obtained purely by conquest ; but 
it seemed rather, that weak tribes voluntarily put themselves under 
the protection of a stronger, as in the instance of the Bamuchars at 
Patani whose numbers were too few to exist as an independent town, 
and who have therefore submitted to the authority of the Chief of 
the Bachapins their nearest neighbours. In the same manner, those 
of the Karrikarries, whose distance from the great body of their own 
nation, leaves them almost a neutral and scattered people, acknow- 
ledge the Chief of Litakun as their head ; while other borderers of the 
same tribe consider themselves as attached to the Barolongs ; nor does 
it, in fact, make any difference to their individual condition, whether 
they acknowledge their own natural Chief or whether they place 
themselves under the protection of any other. The Sichuana lan- 
guage, being common to all these different tribes, seems to unite 
them into one great nation ; and a change of rulers therefore is, to 
them, little more than a change of persons. 
Of the existence of any tribe governed in the forms of a re- 
public, I could gain no intelHgence ; and such is probably not to be 
found among the Caffre race. It is a remarkable fact, that while this 
race have reached nearly the highest degree, or modification, of 
patriarchal authority, the Hottentot race remain every where at the 
lowest ; and, as it has been shown in the preceding parts of this 
journal, almost without any head possessed of an actually governing 
power, a lawless, wild, and uncontrolled people, living in the sim- 
plest and rudest form of human society. On contemplating the 
great difference in many respects between these two races, one cannot 
but feel a conviction, that there must exist in them some innate and 
essential principle to cause so permanent a distinction, and which 
proximity of territory and the intercourse of ages, have been unable 
to do away or to modify. Every different view of the Hottentot 
tribes, whether physically, geographically, or morally, considered, 
serves only to strengthen the first impression which they make, that 
they constitute an isolated and very distinct race of human beings, 
whose locality at the southernmost point of Africa, is a mystery 
hitherto unexplained, and the history of whose first existence in the 
