1S2 
ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO. 
ing the same. These French Huguenots, nearly all steady, honest 
and God-fearing folk, became a source of great strength to the 
rising colony. 
During the last century the Boers spread far and wide into 
Cape Colony, traversing pathless deserts, waterless karroos, and 
difficult mountain country, in search of new homes and pastures. 
Many of them were hunters pure and simple, and followed the ele¬ 
phants for their ivory. As they moved inland, magistracies were 
tardily established in their midst, not lest they might lapse into 
utter barbarians, but to enable an anxious government to draw its 
taxation from the land on which they settled. Churches and schools 
followed the settlers yet more tardily. 
THE REIGN OF THE BOER. 
Far-removed though they have been from churches and pastors, 
they have yet clung closely to the primitive faith of their fore¬ 
fathers. Wherever they have trekked, the great Dutch Bible, often 
more than two hundred years old, and its lessons, have gone with 
them. At morning and at night, wherever they may be, prayer and 
thanksgiving are invariably offered up. 
It is the fashion among the “Uitlanders” to ridicule the long 
and somewhat dreary prayers of these Dutch farmers; yet, surely 
it is to the credit of the Boers that, amid every danger and diffi¬ 
culty, they have thus preserved their faith. Even when marching 
to fight the Zulu hosts under Dingaan in Natal, they offered up 
prayers at every halt, and the 400 farmers who met and conquered 
10,000 Zulus at the Blood River in 1838 attributed their astonish¬ 
ing victory to the idrect intervention of the Ford of Hosts in answer 
to their supplications. 
In 1796 the British, by arrangement, with the Stadtholder of 
the Dutch Republic, then a fugitive from the armies of the French 
Republic, took possession of the Cape, which in 1803 was handed 
back to the Dutch. In 1806 the British, being then at war with 
the Dutch, again took possession of the Cape Colony, after a severe 
struggle near Cape Town. From that time the Cape has been con¬ 
tinuously in the hands of Great Britain. 
