The intention of the English folk who voted the sum was generous; in reality, owing to the blundering of officials and the cunning and rapacity of speculators (already the poisoners of English rule in South Africa), all went wrong. Very little of the money voted ever reached the hands of the people for whom it was intended. Men and women who had been in affluence before were everywhere reduced to absolute beggary; and they had the additional irritation of knowing that, while they were supposed to have been generously dealt with, they had received nothing. When one remembers that the bitterest war of this century was waged, only forty years ago, between the English-speaking folk of America, when one half of the community endeavoured to compel the other to relinquish its slaves, it is a matter of astonishment that the slave-owners of the Cape Colony so quietly gave up their claims, claims which till that time had been recognized by every nation on earth as wholly just and defensible. But that which most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated by their rulers, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race. It is this consciousness which among a high-spirited people forms the bitterest dreg to the cup of sorrow put to the lips of a people governed by aliens, and one for which no material advantage can atone. In the eastern parts of the Cape Colony the feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined to leave for ever the Colony and the homes which they had created, and to move northward to the regions yet untouched by the white man, where they might form for themselves new homes, and raise an independent state. It is this movement that is known in South African history as "The Great Trek."