There are times to-day, riding across the plains in the direction of Hottentots Holland, when the vision of these creatures creeping across the veld in search of freedom comes suddenly to one; and a curious feeling rises. We are not in that band that rides booted and spurred across the plain, looking out to right and left and talking loud. We are in the little group cowering behind the milk bushes; we are looking out with furtive, bloodshot eyes, to see how the masters ride! We--we--are there;--we are no more conscious of our identity with the dominant race. Over a million years of diverse evolution white man clasps dark again--and we are one, as we cower behind the bushes; the black and the white. But slavery in South Africa, as elsewhere, did not always show its misshapen and deformed side; there were cases in which as men grew up they learnt to feel gently to the hands that had tended them in early infancy, and showed kindness; and kindness begat gratitude, and gratitude begat love--and the circle of human beatitude was complete. In certain rare instances the words master and slave came to mean not user and used, but giver and lover, and human nature was justified in the lowest of her kinships. If it were, however, made absolutely compulsory on us to pass a relative judgment on slavery as it existed at the Cape or elsewhere among civilized nations, we should say that probably it was less touched by humanizing and elevating conditions than was the case occasionally where, as among the Greeks and Romans, it existed among men of the same colour, and often of the same race and intellectual standing; but that the Boer, being, though not more gentle when roused, yet naturally of a somewhat more pacific nature than the Spaniard or Englishman, it is highly probable that slavery at the Cape was of a much _less_, than more, ferocious nature than elsewhere, where an Aryan people has enslaved a dark one.