We have seen that, within a generation and a half from the landing of the Huguenots, they had intermarried and blended with the earlier settlers; and that their common language was the "Taal" (whether that language was a speech imported from some northern region, or a South African growth); that they were in possession of slaves, who planted and built for them; and that further, they were permeated by the conception that they were the chosen people of God; that South Africa was a personal bequest to themselves; that the aboriginal inhabitants of the land were the true Hittites, Perizzites and Jebusites, whom the God of the Jewish Scripture had ordered should be destroyed; and that they held, with an intensity of conviction which it is impossible for the nineteenth-century European fully to understand, that they were the very people to whom the threats and promises of the Jewish Scriptures were held out; and that, should they obey the commandments delivered unto them, their seed should become as the sand of the seashore for multitude, and they should inherit South Africa. Settled on the beautiful Cape Peninsula, and in the lovely Western valleys, where the wild flowers bloom as nowhere else on the earth's surface; where the streams never fail, and the high mountains shut out the parching winds of the north, and where almost every plant known to civilized man will flourish; and where the few Hottentots and Bushmen who had inhabited the land having been easily exterminated or driven away, each man sat (not figuratively, but literally) under his own vine and his own fig-tree, enjoying the fruits thereof; it would be imagined that, at least for many generations, the descendants of the early settlers would have rested, cultivating and peopling their lands along the coast. But it was not so. The hand of the Dutch East India Company rested heavily on the people. In some respects a fair government, and sometimes represented by able men, it yet, like all other kindred commercial despotisms, crushed the people where its own interests were concerned under an iron heel. They might not trade nor barter with the natives, lest they should interfere with the Company's profits; they might not plant or sow as they wished; coffee and spice were forbidden as interfering with the Company's monopoly in the East; the smallest details of daily life were regulated by an externally imposed law; and the people writhed.