The somewhat intolerant government of the Company hastened the blending of the various classes of the population in one. The Huguenots loved their language and their peculiar faith, and greatly desired to found a separate religious community. But the Company forbade the use of French in official documents and in religious services. As a result of this narrow but far-seeing policy, by the middle of the eighteenth century the Huguenots had amalgamated with their Dutch fellow-colonists in language, religion and politics. It was not until 1780 that the Company’s government permitted the opening of a Lutheran church, although many Germans of that persuasion had emigrated to the Cape. The distinctive Africander type of character began to appear at the time when the settlers began to move from the coast into the interior of the country. There was everything to favor the rapid development of a new type of humanity. For the most part the Dutch and the Germans belonged to the humbler classes; the situation was isolated; the home ties were few; the voyage to Europe was so long that communication was difficult and expensive; and so they maintained little connection with—and soon lost all feeling for—the fatherlands. As for the Huguenots, they had no home country to look to. France had banished them, and they were not of Holland—neither in blood nor in speech. Thus it came to pass that the whites of South Africa who went into the interior as pioneers went consenting to the feeling that every bond between Europe and themselves was severed—that they were a new people whose true home and destiny, to the latest generations, were to be in Africa. Many of them became stockmen, roaming with their flocks and herds over vast tracts of grazing lands, for which they paid a nominal rent to the Company. Some of them became mighty hunters of big game—like Nimrod; and even those who herded cattle and sheep were forced to protect themselves and their live stock against lions and leopards and the savage Bushmen who waged a constant warfare in which quarter was neither given nor expected. In such circumstances it is not wonderful that the people who had in their veins the blended blood of Holland and Navarre developed to an almost unparalleled degree courage, self-reliance and love of independence, coupled with a passion for solitude and isolation.