All these qualities have become accentuated in the two republics, while the latter ones have not been called into practical exercise of late years in the Colonies proper. The Boer of the Transvaal and the Free State is, in fact, a most peculiar type even in that region of the strangest inconsistencies. Authorities are not wanting who praise his general character in terms of the highest laudation. Mr. J. A. Froude, after spending a few crowded weeks in South Africa, declared with almost poetic enthusiasm of the Boers that they: "of all human beings now on this planet, correspond nearest to Horace's description of the Roman peasant soldiers who defeated Pyrrhus and Hannibal." Mr. F. C. Selous, who has hunted with and amongst them for years, found "no people in the world more genuinely kind and hospitable to strangers than the South African Dutch." Other less well-known travellers and public men have spoken in equally high terms of the Boer; while during the last few years a whole library of literature has been published on his behalf, and proves, if it does nothing else, that Englishmen have plenty of impartiality in dealing with such subjects. On the other hand, evidence accumulates that the character made by history and environment is in this case a permanent one; that the Boer of to-day is the natural and inevitable product of the past; and that the visitor, or traveller, or the interested advocate of racial and political theories, can no more turn over the pages of a record written in blood and sorrow throughout the wild veldt of South Africa than the Boer himself can, in Rudyard Kipling's phrase, "turn back the hands of the clock" in the region now under his control. Dr. Livingstone saw more of the emigrant farmer in the formative days of his republican and independent existence than any other Englishman, and he has described the strongest influence in his historic evolution as a distinct racial type[1] in the following words: "They are all traditionally religious, tracing their descent from some of the best men (Huguenots and Dutch) the world ever saw. Hence they claim to themselves the title of 'Christians,' and all the colored race are 'black property' or 'creatures.' They being the chosen people of God, the heathen are given to them for an inheritance, and they are the rod of divine vengeance on the heathen as were the Jews of old.... No one can understand the effect of the unutterable meanness of the slave system on the minds of those who, but for the strange obliquity which prevents them from feeling the degradation of not being gentlemen enough to pay for services rendered, would be equal in virtue to ourselves. Fraud becomes as natural to them as 'paying one's way' is to the rest of mankind." [1] Dr. Livingstone's _Missionary Travels_. London, 1857. [Sidenote: Impressions of James Bryce]