BOER CHARACTER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2292, 3 February 1898, Page 49

BOER CHARACTER.

We make the following extract from Professor Bryce's book "Impressions of South Africa," just published, as showing that eminent man's estimate of the Boer character: — Living in the open air, and mostly in the saddle, they are strangely ignorant and oldfashioned in all their ideas. They have bo literature and very few newspapers. Their religion ia the Datch and Huguenot Calvinism cf the seventeenth century, rigid and stern, hostile to all new light, imbued with the spirit of tha Old Testament rather than of the New. They dislike and despise the Kaffirs, whom they have regarded as Israel may have regarded Amalek, and whom they have treated with equal severity. They hate the English also, who are to them ths hereditary enemies that conquered them at the Cape, that drove them out into the wilderness in 1836, that annexed their Bepnblic in 1877, and thereafter broke the promise* ot selfgovernment made at the time of the annexation, that stopped their expansion on the west by occupying Bachuanaland, and on the north by occapyicg Matabeleland and Mashonaland, and that are now, as they believe, plotting to finl some pretext for overthrowing their independence. Their usual term (when they talk among themselves) for an Englishman is " rotten egg." This hatred is mingled with a contempt for those whom thay defeated at Lsing's Nek and Majaba Hil), and with a fear born of ths sense that the English are their superiors in knowledge, in activity, and in statecraft. It is always hard for a nation to see the good qualities of its rivals and the strong points of its opponents' case; but with the Boers the difficulty is all tha greater because they know little or nothing of the modern world and of international politics. Two centuries of solitary pastoral life have not only given them an aversion for commerce, for industrial pursuits, and for finance, j but an absolute incapacity for such occupations, so that when gold was discovered in their country they did not even attempt to work it, bub were content to sell, usually for a price far below its valu?, the land where the gold reefs lay, and move off with the proceeds to resume elsewhere their pastoral life. They have the virtues appropriate to a eimpla society. They are brave, goodnatured, hospitable, faithful to one another, generally pure in their dotneblic life, seldom touched by avarice or ambition. Bub tbe corruption of their legislature shows that it is rather to the absence of temptation than to any superior strength of moral princSpie that theee merit* have been due. For politics tbey hava little taste or gift. Politics can flourish oEly whare people aro massed together, and the Boer is a solitary being «?ho meets his f«llowa solely for the purposes of religion or soma festive gathering. Yet, ignorant and slow-witted aa they are, inborn ability and resolution are not wanting. They have, indeed, a double^measure of wariness and willioess in their intercourse with strangers, because their habitual suspicion makes them seek in craft the defence for their ignorance of affair*; while thftir native doggedneßs ia confirmed by their belief in the continued guidance and prctsction ot that Providence whoee hand led theca through tht wilderness and gave them the the victory over nil their enemies. Thia was the people into whos« territory there cam?, aftef 1884, a »udd«n swarm of gold-seekers. . . . There haa been in the antagonism of the Boar and the English far more than the jealousy ol two races. There haa bsen a collision of two typea of civilisation —o»e belonging to the nineteenth century, the other to the seventeenth.