82 
A COLONY IN THE MAKING 
CHAP. 
must make one partial exception to this general good¬ 
will—-the Boer. Now the Boer, as a Boer, is no more 
unacceptable in the Protectorate than in other parts of 
the Empire. Throughout the whole of that Empire the 
fight that he put up and the sacrifices that he made ere 
he joined it gave him a free pass to its good-fellowship. 
The country numbers many Boers who are not only 
respected but most popular. Unfortunately, owing to 
mischance, and I fear I must add mismanagement, 
they are in a minority. In 1908 there was an influx of 
Boers, of whom it would not be too much to say that 
they left their country for their country’s good. They 
arrived pretty well destitute. Probably ^2000 would 
have covered the worldly wealth of the whole 300 
or 400. They applied for farms. Now the land 
regulations say, and rightly so, that any applicant 
should be possessed of £4 00 at least before he be 
allotted a farm. This regulation would have cut out 
some 95 per cent, of these applicants ; and I venture to 
say that, had they been Englishmen, they would have 
been refused. An innate sense of chivalry—and, 
might I add, a policy of laissez-faire ?—caused their 
applications to be accepted and they were one and all 
granted farms. Even so, it might not have been a 
serious matter had they been scattered throughout the 
country, but, alas ! they were all granted farms in one 
block in the newly opened Uasin Guishu Plateau. 
This plateau forms in some ways the keystone of the 
whole Protectorate. This is due not so much to its 
fertility and climate, though both are excellent, but to 
the fact that it is by far the largest tract of country at 
present opened which is not subdivided either naturally 
or artificially ; for here we have at least two million 
acres of splendid land undivided by native, forest, or 
