During the next six years the Colony was governed under some of the milder laws of its mother-land; though not always to the liking of Dutch settlers, who objected to political equality--even in the limited application of the the phrase which was then in vogue--being given to "persons of every creed who acknowledged and worshipped a Supreme Being." To them there was only one Church as well as only one people, and religious or political equality was as extraneous to their ideas as racial equality. Nor would they have anything to do with the state schools which the Batavian Government tried to establish amongst them as being some improvement upon the few and feeble schools connected with the churches. All useful discussion or development of such tentative efforts at reform were checked, however, by the renewed outbreak, in 1803, of war in Europe, and by the appearance in Table Bay, on January 4, 1806, of a British fleet of sixty-three ships, with 7,000 soldiers under the command of Major-General (afterward Sir) David Baird. The troops landed on the beach at Blueberg, defeated a very motley force of German mercenaries, Dutch soldiers, volunteers, Malays, Hottentots and slaves under General Janssens and marched toward Cape Town. Capitulation followed, and, on March 6th, transports took away from South Africa the last representative of direct Dutch rule. [Sidenote: Again Under British Rule] The settlers did not take kindly to the new Government, and lived in continuous anticipation of some fresh change in the European kaleidoscope--so far as they could, in a very vague way, follow situation--which would once more revive the power of the Batavian Republic through a renewed French triumph, and thus give them back their allegiance. It was not that they had greatly prized Dutch rule when it was theirs without the asking; that the brief period of republican administration had really soothed their wild ideas of liberty or removed the dangers of Kaffir raid and native aggression; or that they had forgotten the century and a half of oppressive government and hurtful restriction which they had suffered from the Dutch East India Company. It was simply the earlier form of that racial feeling of antagonism which--unlike the sentiment of civilized peoples like the French in Canada and the better class Hindoos, or educated Mohammedans of India, and the wild natures of Sikhs and Ghoorkas and kindred races in the Orient--has never given way before the kindness and good intentions of British administration. Mistakes were, of course, made by England, as they have been made in Lower Canada as well as in Upper Canada, in Ireland as in India; but the resulting dissatisfaction should not have been permanent. However that may be, the new Government started out wisely. Under the Earl of Caledon, a young Irish nobleman, who ruled from 1807 to 1811, the system of the first period of British administration