Doubtless the colonists were influenced, to a greater degree than they realized, by the natural dislike of any civilized people to be transferred to the rule of a foreign nation. They were not the kind of people to make much of the fact that the Dutch and the English sprang from a common origin more than fourteen hundred years before—if they had any knowledge of it. To them the British were a different race, and the British government was a kind of unloved step-father who had first conquered dominion over them by the strong hand and then bought them with money, as perpetual chattels, from their degenerate mother country. Another cause of the failure to amalgamate was in the now fixed character of the South African Dutch. Few of them dwelt or cared to dwell in village communities. Some were farmers, it is true, living in touch with the towns; but most of them were stockmen roaming in a pastoral life over large tracts of the country—almost without local habitation. At long intervals they saw something of their always distant next neighbor ranchmen, but they saw nothing of the life in the few colonial towns. The intercourse between these pastoral Africanders and the British was so infrequent, and so limited as to scope, that the two races knew but little of one another. As a result, the process of social amalgamation, going on at Cape Town and in some other places where the population lived in communities, made little progress in the country districts where the great majority of the Africanders dwelt.