38 ON AN EAST AFRICAN RANCH [ch. ii 
trekkers with the same names who led the hard-fighting 
farmers northward from the Cape seventy years ago, 
and were kinsfolk of the men who since then have 
made these names honourably known throughout the 
world. There must, of course, be many Boers who 
have gone backward under the stress of a hard and 
semi-savage life ; just as in our communities of the 
frontier, the backwoods, and the lonely mountains, there 
are shiftless “ poor whites ” and “ mean whites ” mingled 
with the sturdy men and women who have laid deep the 
foundations of our national greatness. But personally 
I happened not to come across these shiftless 6 mean 
white ” Boers. Those that I met, both men and women, 
were of as good a type as anyone could wish for in his 
own countrymen or could admire in another nationality. 
They fulfilled the three prime requisites for any race : 
they worked hard, they could fight hard at need, and 
they had plenty of children. These are the three 
essential qualities in any and every nation ; they are by 
no means all-sufficient in themselves, and there is need 
that many others should be added to them; but the 
lack of any one of them is fatal, and cannot be made 
good by the presence of any other set of attributes. 
It was pleasant to see the good terms on which Boer 
and Briton met. Many of the English settlers whose 
guest I was, or with whom I hunted—the Hills, Captain 
Slatter, Heatley, Judd—had fought through the South 
African War; and so had all the Boers I met. The 
latter had been for the most part members of various 
particularly hard-fighting commandos ; when the war 
closed they felt very bitterly, 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 over- 
