If then, when the statement is made that the South African Boer has not treated the South African native as it is desirable man should treat man, it be meant to imply that in his treatment of the dark races his conduct has been at one with that of all other European races, and that he has not entered on that loftier and more socialized course of action toward subject and dark races, to which it is our hope that the humanity of the future will attain, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly true. But if, on the other hand, it be intended by the assertion to imply that the South African Boer, in his treatment of the dark races with whom he has been thrown into contact, has been less governed by just and humane instincts than men of other races under like conditions, that the English slave-trader or speculator, the Portuguese adventurer, the Spanish conqueror, the Jamaica planter have treated the African native better, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly false. As the student of racial problems has continually occasion to repeat, there has been no wide difference between the attitude of different white races when brought into contact with dark, whether in Asia, Africa, or America; but on the whole the relation of the African Boer with the African native, sorrowful as are all inter-racial relations, has yet probably tended to be rather slightly more and not less pacific than those of other races. This results in no way from the higher humanitarian standpoint of the Boer, but from his circumstances. Firstly, from the fact that his numbers have always been small and insignificant as compared with those of the Bantus, the African people with which he has mainly had to deal, and that the Bantus, being one of the most virile and powerful of all dark races, it has not been possible for him to dominate them as he might have done a feebler people. (Were the natives of India of the same independent and resolute spirit as the Bantus of South Africa, England could never have subjected and held them down, as she has done at the point of the bayonet, for sixty years.) Secondly, the African Boers are a peculiarly pacific and even-tempered people, not quickly roused to anger or any other emotion, though when roused yet difficult to appease; and, as acts of violence towards subject people are most often the results of sudden outburst of passion, the native has probably fared somewhat better at their hands than in those of a more quick-blooded race.