In the Colony of Natal, the northern part is still mainly populated by Boers, the descendants of those men who there founded their early Republic of Natal, and remained when the rest of their fellows trekked across the Drakensberg into the Transvaal.
Taking South Africa thus as a whole, the descendants of the Dutch-Huguenots outnumber the white men of all other races put together, and immensely those of purely British descent. But everywhere the process of intermarriage has been so vast and rapid during the last thirty years that it is no more possible to draw a quite sharp dividing line between the two races. There are probably to-day no large South African families, Dutch or English, which have not during the last thirty years intermarried. And in another generation the word Dutchman and Englishman will have lost all meaning and be heard no more; we shall then be only the blended South African Nation.
Before turning to consider the English element in our society, we would linger yet a moment, before we finally leave the Boer, to consider some of the many assertions made with regard to him, and what of truth or falsehood appears to us to lie in them, and, above all, how they have come to be made.
It has been said, though it will probably never be said again by any person who knows what courage is, that the Boer is a coward and cannot fight. How, in view of his history during the last two hundred years, this ever came to be said, even by his bitterest foes, has appeared to us always a matter of some astonishment. We can explain it in any way only when we consider the fact that bravery, like every other virtue, may assume more than one shape, and that men accustomed to recognize it under one aspect do not readily recognize it under another. In the animal world, there is the courage of the bull terrier always eager for a conflict, and seeking a fellow combatant for the pleasure of fighting him, and the courage of the mastiff, whom you may even tread on with impunity as he lies sleeping at your foot, but who, should his master or his master's property be attacked, may be more dangerous than any bull terrier; there is the courage of the tigress robbed of her young, who faces fearlessly fire and death to regain it, yet at other times prefers to slink away from man, and there is the courage of the game-cock who chafes angrily against the bars to reach the game-cocks in other cages; and the courage of the red African mier-kat, who attacked, will try to get to his hole, and, if he cannot, will fight fearlessly to the death.[71]