Hollanders and French Huguenots "a united people, one in religion,
united in peaceful reverence for the law, but with a feeling of liberty
and independence equal to the wide expanse of territory which they had
rescued as a labour of love from the wilderness of nature, or from its
still wilder aboriginal inhabitants." When the Dutch Government made way
for that of Great Britain in 1806, and, still more, when that change was
sealed in 1814 by a transaction in which the Prince of Orange sold the
Cape to Great Britain for £6,000,000 against the wish and will of the
inhabitants, the little settlement entered upon a new phase of its
history, a phase, indeed, in which its people were destined by their
heroic struggle for justice, to enlist a world-wide sympathy on their
behalf.

[Sidenote: England's native policy.]

Notwithstanding the wild surroundings and the innumerable savage tribes
in the background, the young Africander nation had been welded into a
white aristocracy, proudly conscious of having maintained its
superiority notwithstanding its arduous struggles. It was this sentiment
of just pride which the British Government well understood how to wound
in its most sensitive part by favouring the natives as against the
Africanders. So, for example, the Africander Boers were forced to look
with pained eyes on the scenes of their farms and property devastated by
the natives without being in a position to defend themselves, because
the British Government had even deprived them of their ammunition. In
the same way the liberty-loving Africander burgher was coerced by a
police composed of Hottentots, the lowest and most despicable class of
the aborigines, whom the Africanders justly placed on a far lower social
level than that of their own Malay slaves.