To the north and east of the utmost limit of European settlement in 1836 was a region now divided into the Orange Free State, The Transvaal or South African Republic, and the British colony of Natal. A few hunters had penetrated a little way into it, and some enterprising border farmers had occasionally driven their flocks and herds into the southern fringe of it in search of better pasture. It had been described by the few who had explored it as having districts that were well watered and fertile—a country of arable and pasture lands. Within it, and bordering close to it on the northwest, were the fierce Zulus; and it abounded with big game and enormous beasts of prey. But the Africanders knew what it was to battle for place and for life with wild beasts and savage men. They had less dread of these than of the experiences they foresaw for themselves under the new government set up in Cape Colony. They made choice of the wilderness with all its hardships and perils, and set forth. One may not be able to laud all their motives for taking this course, as we judge such matters now, after more than half a century during which there has been a constant brightening of the light of moral truth. It must be admitted that their action was taken, in part, because of attachment to slavery. But condemnation of that part of their complex motives should be modified by the thought that the best peoples of the world were just then coming to see with John Wesley that human slavery is “the sum of all villainies.” And it should be remembered that nearly thirty years later than the Africander secession and exodus partly in the interest of slavery, fully one-third of the free population of the United States seceded from the Union wholly in the interest of the same “peculiar institution,” claiming to hold their lands as well as their slave property, and that it cost the nation a million lives and a thousand million dollars to transmute into American practice the lofty sentiment embodied in the American Declaration of Independence that, being created equal, all men have sacred rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” After discounting fairly the nobility of their motives in making the “Great Trek,” it will be allowed by every unprejudiced mind that with the less laudable were mingled the love of manly independence and a reasonable resentment at injustices done them in several matters, and that they were supported in the hazardous undertaking by a courage equal to that of the Pilgrim Fathers in venturing into the New England wilderness.