Chap. II. 
TKEATMENT OF NATIVES BY BOERS. 
31 
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 conceive 
that any body of men possessing the common attributes 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 aud 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 compelled to admit the validity of the testi¬ 
mony, and try to account for the cruel anomaly. They are all 
traditionally religious, tracing 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 
coloured race are “ black property ” or “ creatoes.” 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 other, they feel somewhat in the same 
insecure position as do the Americans in the Southern States. 
