The Africander love of independence, and their reasonable objection to be civilly on a level with the ignorant and savage blacks, command respect and admiration; but their treatment of the natives, where unrestrained by British rule, was anything but creditable. They may be excused for many wars with Bushmen and Kaffirs, for their very lives depended on either reducing these to submission or driving them to a safe distance from the white settlements. But the enslaving of men and women, and, later, of children under the subterfuge of apprenticeship for a term of years, cannot be justified; it was monstrously incompatible with the insistent demand for personal freedom for themselves so conspicuous in the Africander race. The one extenuating circumstance is the fact that, leading an isolated life, they were slower than other civilized peoples in catching the spirit of the age—a spirit that makes for freedom, and a growing betterment in the condition of every man. The exodus of Natal Africanders between 1843 and 1848 encouraged an immense influx of Kaffirs, who repopulated the country so plentifully that the proportion of blacks to whites has been as ten to one ever since. The emigrants who settled north of the Vaal, both those of the Great Trek and those from Natal who began to join them in 1843, were rude and uneducated as compared to their brethren of the Orange River region. The northern group had less of English blood in their veins, and because of distance and difficulty of communication they were not at all affected by intercourse with the more cultured people of Cape Colony. Lacking the upward lead that contact with a progressive civilization would have given, there took place a marked degeneration of character in these more northern emigrants. Their love of independence was developed into a spirit of faction and dissension among themselves. Their lionlike bravery was perverted into a too great readiness to fight on the smallest provocation, and a disposition to prey upon their weaker native neighbors. Through a desire to enlarge their grazing lands they became greedy as to territory, and were almost constantly engaged in bloody strife with the native occupants of the regions they insisted on annexing.