ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH 
39 
and wished to avoid living under the British flag. Some 
moved West and some East; those I met were among the 
many hundreds, indeed thousands, who travelled northward 
—a few overland, most of them by water—to German East 
Africa. But in the part in which they happened to settle 
they were decimated by fever, and their stock perished of 
cattle sickness; and most of them had again moved north¬ 
ward, and once more found themselves under the British 
flag. They were being treated precisely on an equality with 
the British settlers; and every well-wisher to his kind, and 
above all every well-wisher to Africa, must hope that the 
men who in South Africa fought so valiantly against one 
another, each for the right as he saw it, will speedily grow 
into a companionship of mutual respect, regard, and con¬ 
sideration such as that which, for our inestimable good fort¬ 
une, now knits closely together in our own land the men 
who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray and 
their descendants. There could be no better and manlier 
people than those, both English and Dutch, who are at 
this moment engaged in the great and difficult task of add¬ 
ing East Africa to the domain of civilization; their work is 
bound to be hard enough anyhow; and it would be a lam¬ 
entable calamity to render it more difficult by keeping 
alive a bitterness which has lost all point and justification, 
or by failing to recognize the fundamental virtues, the fun¬ 
damental characteristics, in which the men of the two 
stocks are in reality so much alike. 
Messrs. Klopper and Loijs, whose farms I visited, were 
doing well; the latter, with three of his sons, took me out 
with pride to show me the dam which they had built across 
a dry watercourse, so as to make a storage reservoir when 
