On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances, but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service; who were as cordially hated as they hated; and whose whole relation with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the farmer does not materially enter.
In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of "race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in the form of a true race feud.