In and about the year 1688, thirty-six years after the first landing of Van Riebeek and his handful of men, there arrived at the Cape a body of French Protestant refugees, numbering in all, men, women and children, somewhat under two hundred souls. These people, driven from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, were offered an asylum in South Africa by the Dutch Government, which they accepted. They were not an ordinary body of emigrants, but represented almost to a man and a woman that golden minority which is so remorselessly winnowed from the dross of the conforming majority by all forms of persecution directed against intellectual and spiritual independence. Mere agriculturists, vine-dressers and mechanics, with but a small sprinkling of persons belonging to the professional classes, these men yet constitute an aristocracy--ennobled, not through the fiat of any monarch, but selected by that law deep-lying in the nature of things, which has ordained that where men shall be found having the force to stand alone, and suffer for abstract conviction, there also shall be found the individuality, virility and power which founds great peoples and marks dominant races. The fate of the South African Boer was safe from the moment these men came to mingle their blood with his; as the fate of the North American States was safe when the _Mayflower_ had crossed with its load of dissentient Englishmen; as the fate of the Spanish colonies would have been safe, had Spain, in place of cauterizing her growing points in the bonfires of the squares of Toledo and Madrid, simply nipped them off from the parent tree and transplanted them alive in her colonies in the New World, there to beget a newer and stronger Spain. One is sometimes astonished at certain qualities found in the South African Boer, till one recalls the fact that a strain of this uncompromising, self-guiding blood runs in his veins; making him, what often in his lowest and poorest conditions he yet remains--an aristocrat!