[70] The yet later story of how another attempt was made by the same hands in new and subtler form, beguiling by misrepresentation a great people into lending them its national mantle to cover the grotesque misshapenness of their nakedness, in order the more easily to grasp the gold and land, and with it the independence of this little nation--this, and much that followed, is known in rough outline to all. But for the present we have gone far enough to be able roughly to estimate what the position is of the African Boer and of his nineteenth century descendant in South Africa, at the present day.
The descendants of the original white inhabitants of the land, entering it a century before we English folks arrived, have, as we have seen, spread themselves out over the whole country, and now form the substratum of the white African Nation. In the Cape Colony, which is still politically connected with the Island of Britain, they number at least three out of five of the white inhabitants of the country. In their lovely old homes in the Western Province, buried away among oaks, and surrounded by vineyards and fruit gardens laid out by their ancestors two centuries ago, the farming descendants of the Dutch-Huguenot live with simple plentifulness amid their supremely beautiful surroundings. In the remote Midlands and Northern and Eastern frontier districts of the Cape Colony they still live often, as we have described, in their simple homes, mighty men of the gun, and rulers over flocks and herds. While in our Colonial towns and villages the descendants of these farming folks are found, whom education has transformed, often in one generation, from the Taal-speaking Boer to the foremost rank of the nineteenth-century civilization and intellectual culture; they are, as we have seen, often among our most able lawyers, our best judges, our most skilful magistrates and civil servants; while the lists of our university examinations are filled with the names of both men and women of Boer descent.
Such is the Boer and such are his descendants in the Cape Colony to-day.
In the two Republics which he has founded he will also be found in both the types, the old and the new; now as the old fore-trekker, with the faiths and virtues and the vices of the seventeenth century strong in him; then as the cultured professional man and the child of the nineteenth century, with all its additions and omissions.