The Dutchmen of South Africa present in character and type one of the most peculiar racial results of all history. They came originally of a people who had proved its love of liberty and its faith in religion on many a well-fought field and in the pages of noble national annals. Yet they did not carry their qualities with them to the new land in any sufficient measure to overcome surrounding influences of a pernicious nature. They were raised from the lowest class in the home community and migrated practically for the wages offered them by the Dutch East India Company. In this respect the origin of the Colony was greatly different from that of New England, to which men of high character and earnest thought had migrated in order to obtain religious freedom; of Virginia, where men of the best English families and culture came in that adventurous spirit which has made the British Empire or the United States a present possibility; of French Canada, where Jesuits roamed the vast forests in a spirit of intense missionary zeal and where the scions of noble French families hunted in the wilderness of the West, or fought the Iroquois on the banks of the St. Lawrence; of English Canada, to which the United Empire Loyalists came from motives of loyalty to King and country. [Sidenote: Their Religious Life] As these Dutch settlers drifted into the Colony, over a period of a hundred years, they left every source of knowledge, refinement and high principle behind them. It is true they had their Bible. Upon its interpretation depended greatly their future development of character amid surroundings of absolute isolation, and it has been a permanent misfortune that they chose the natural view of narrow and ignorant men, and made their religious life one of practical devotion to the Old Testament dispensation in a most crude and sometimes cruel application. Around them on all sides were the moral laxities of savage life, the dangerous powers of slavery, the looseness incident to any small population of whites in the midst of great numbers of ignorant and superstitious natives. Their Government was intolerant in the extreme, they had no books or newspapers, they saw no intelligent visitors, and the naturally somewhat sombre character of the Dutchman developed under these conditions into a unique mixture of religious zeal, intolerant ignorance and qualified immorality. To this character was added the quality of undoubted bravery and into the general melting pot was thrown the further attributes, as time went on, of intense dislike and distrust of the Englishman and of absolute confidence and belief in themselves. [Sidenote: Mixture of Huguenots and Dutch Culture]