The folk whom the early settlers procured as slaves, were mainly negroes from the east and west coast of Central Africa; a people who, combined with a great deal of muscular power, and a charming gift of devotion to others, exhibit a weakness of will, and an absence of individuality, which in all ages has fitted them to inflict the evils of slavery on the more dominant races. With these were Madagascan and other Eastern folk, with more individuality, who, we are told, gave their owners much trouble. These captive people were brought in ships to South Africa, and on their arrival portioned out among the early settlers. It was by the hands of these folks that the walls of the old Dutch houses, whose thickness we still so much admire, were raised, and it was they who planted the long lines of oak avenue and vineyard which still stretch mile after mile across our land. It is sometimes thrown into the teeth of the Boer, as an accusation which sets him on a completely lower platform than that on which his English fellow-citizen stands, that his fathers were slave-owners. That this should be so is, indeed, remarkable; not only when we reflect that most of those ships which brought the first slaves to South Africa were the property of Englishmen and manned and officered by English seamen; but when we further reflect that, if the houses and avenues of the Cape Peninsula are often the work of slaves, the yet fairer homes and the easeful leisure of certain cultured English men and women at the present day are the result of their fathers' traffic in black flesh. And it is yet more remarkable that the fact of a slave-owning ancestry should ever be thrown in the face of the Boer when we reflect that it is not forty years since the leading branch of the Anglo-Saxon people found no other means of removing the institution from among themselves than by rending their national life well-nigh to fragments. Slavery is, in truth, a condition so common in the very early stages of social growth, and when it occurs in those stages is generally so comparatively innoxious that it may almost be regarded as a natural if not quite healthy concomitant of early social development. When the primitive master and his slave live in like huts, share like food, and are engaged in like occupations, slavery is slavery in nothing but name. It is exactly in proportion as a society has attained to a high intellectual and material development that the institution exhibits its most malignant features; causing an arrest of both moral and material progress in any highly cultured and civilized society in the midst of which it is found.