The system of oppression, adds the Report, thus began, never slackened till the Hottentot nation were cut off, and the small remnant left were reduced to abject bondage. From all the accounts we have seen respecting the Hottentot population, it could not have been less than 200,000, but at present they are said to be only 32,000 in number. In 1702 the Governor and Council stated their inability to restrain the plunderings and outrages of the colonists upon the natives, on the plea that such an act would implicate and ruin half the colony; and in 1798, Barrow, in his Travels in Southern Africa, thus describes their condition:—“Some of their villages might have been expected to remain in this remote and not very populous part of the colony. Not one, however, was to be found. There is not, in fact, in the whole district of Graaff Reynet, a single horde of independent Hottentots, and perhaps not a score of individuals who are not actually in the service of the Dutch. These weak people—the most helpless, and, in their present condition, perhaps the most wretched of the human race,—duped out of their possessions, their country, and their liberty, have entailed upon their miserable offspring a state of existence to which that of slavery might bear the comparison of happiness. It is a condition, however, not likely to continue to a very remote posterity. Their numbers, of late years, have been rapidly on the decline. It has generally been observed, that where Europeans have colonized, the less civilized nations have always dwindled away, and at length totally disappeared.... There is scarcely an instance of cruelty said to have been committed against the slaves in the West Indian islands, that could not find a parallel from the Dutch farmers towards the Hottentots in their service. Beating and cutting with thongs of the sea-cow (hippopotamus), or rhinoceros, are only gentle punishments; though those sort of whips, which they call _sjambocs_, are most horrid instruments, being tough, pliant, and heavy almost as lead. Firing small shot into the legs and thighs of a Hottentot is a punishment not unknown to some of the monsters who inhabit the neighbourhood of Camtoos. By a resolution of the old government, a boor was allowed to claim as his property, till the age of twenty-five, all the children of the Hottentots to whom he had given in their infancy a morsel of meat. At the expiration of this period, the odds are two to one that the slave is not emancipated; but should he be fortunate enough to escape at this period, the best part of his life has been spent in a profitless servitude, and he is turned adrift without any thing he can call his own, except the sheep-skin on his back.”