[39] We are well aware of the argument that, by bridging the cavity which yawns between race and race, the Half-caste serves to make possible a more kindly sense of union between the two. We see the weight of this argument, and allow something for it, even much; but, so enormous is the amount of suffering inflicted by the intermingling of the dark and light races in South Africa to-day, that no hypothetical gain seems to justify it. We have now dealt, with such fullness as for the moment we are able, at the problem of Half-castism, which slavery has been mainly instrumental in bequeathing to South Africa. At the other multitudinous, and in certain ways more important, effects of slavery on the peoples of South Africa, it will be more convenient to glance later. In South Africa, as elsewhere among civilized peoples, what an enslaved race may have endured physically is amply avenged by emotional and social loss on the part of the enslaving till the balance of loss inclines, at last, rather in the direction of the owning than the owned. The good, aboriginal, old South African thought, doubtless, as did his English brother in America, that when his slaves were safely landed, and the slaver had been paid and had sailed away, his black folk had been settled for, and that he had now nothing to do but enjoy in peace the fruits of their labour. But his descendants are learning, and will yet have to learn, with their American cousins, that what was paid on that day was but the first instalment of a long, national debt. We in South Africa have been steadily paying it for two hundred years, and when the last instalment will be due is not yet at all clear. For the evils of slavery in a civilized community are like those birds of prey which may indeed leave their nests in the morning, but at nightfall return to the old nest, and are sure to be found there, nestling soft and warm. We have now glanced at those facts in the early condition of the Boer which it is necessary we should look at if we are at all to understand his relation to the land of South Africa; and we are prepared to pass on to glance at his later history, and to an analysis of his condition to-day. CHAPTER IV THE WANDERINGS OF THE BOER