The insufficient development of South Africa in respect to its agricultural and pastoral resources is largely due to the unprogressiveness of the Boer or South African farmer. He personifies useless idleness, and contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle; he seldom plants a tree; seldom digs a well; seldom makes a road; and has an unmitigated contempt for agriculture and agriculturists. His ploughs, harrows, and utensils of husbandry are clumsy, ill-formed, and, where they exist at all, are hopelessly antiquated. He cannot be prevailed upon to make any alteration whatsoever in the system of his agriculture. His ancestors were farmers, and he himself does not conceive it to be his duty to alter methods which were already obsolete when he was a child. The English farmer, with good training, active disposition, and accurate knowledge of how and where to institute radical reforms, possessing capital, might find both home and fortune in these areas. It is a good cattle country, and with a careful reorganisation in the management of the cattle-farms across the border--a reorganisation which should extend throughout all agrestic or nomadic communities in the Transvaal--it should receive material assistance from the farms of the western border of the Transvaal that are already stocked. The Dutch farmer, living the life of the patriarch of old, leaves everything to nature, and does not, as a rule, combine the varieties of farming which his property would sustain. He remains a stock-breeder, or a grower of cereals: the combination of the two is usually too complex. It will be therefore a good thing should a different basis of management be inculcated, and when this be accomplished, greater facilities for stocking their farms will be held out to the intending colonists who may favour the country, but for the time the new-comers should check their eagerness, since, above all things, capital will be necessary to their salvation. CHAPTER XXXI "A HISTORY OF THE BARALONGS" MAFEKING, _March 22nd, 1900_.