Between 1652 and 1783 the European population of the Cape increased to about twenty-five thousand persons, in comparison with an increase of four millions in the English population of the thirteen American Colonies during much the same period. But conditions were different and the character of the settlers still more so. The Dutch East India Company ruled with despotic power, and its regulations read like a product of romantic imagination. Slaves were, of course, permitted and encouraged, and, in 1754, the penalty of death was fixed for any slave raising his hand against his master, and that of a severe flogging for any who loitered outside the church doors during service time. [Sidenote: How the French Huguenots were Received] The French Protestants, or Huguenots, who came out in 1688-90, were welcomed as settlers, but were very soon shown that no ideas of racial equality pervaded the Dutch mind. A schoolmaster was imported expressly to teach the children the language of the dominant race. No separate communities were allowed, and the French were carefully mixed amongst the Dutch and other settlers. Requests for distinct church organization were stigmatized as impertinent, and the use of the language was forbidden in official or public life. By the middle of the eighteenth century it had entirely died. Sumptuary laws of the most extraordinary character prevailed. Any person seeing the Governor approach had to stop his carriage and get out of it. No one lower in rank than a merchant could use a large umbrella, and only the wives and daughters of those who were, or had been, members of the Council could do so. The trade monopoly of the Company was so rigorous that Colonists were entirely debarred from external commerce, and were dependent upon officials for the sale and price of their products. They had not the most elementary self-government, and at the end of the eighteenth century did not possess a printing press. Cut off from all literature, having nothing but the Bible and a metrical version of the Psalms, they developed a type of character unique in itself and productive of most serious consequences. [Sidenote: The System of "Loan Leases"]