If a more minute and exact history of what slavery really was in South Africa be required, it will perhaps be found best recorded by each of us in our hearts. If in those lowest moments which come, if rarely, to each human soul, when the primitive man wakes, and hatred and passion, aided by self-interest, fight for the mastery within us; if at these moments the most developed among us will turn our gaze inwards, and imagine that the object of our hatred or desire lies in our hand, unshielded from us by any fear of reprisals, unguarded from us by that mighty wall, which long ages of contact with our brethren has built up in the human heart round the rights of our equals--if we imagine that the wall reared by conscience does not in this case exist, hedging our fellows from us, that early training has convinced us that he lives for _us_, and that the primal law of his moral being in submission to _our_ will--we shall then have a clearer picture of what slavery really was in South Africa and elsewhere than any pen can paint. We shall understand, as none can make us, why it is that humanity, as she creeps on her upward path, is slowly but surely withdrawing herself from all remnants of those institutions which are based on the conviction that it may be well for one man to dominate another for his own ends. The causes and evils of slavery are not to be studied in South Africa or America, but among the shadows within our own hearts. And this much-talked-of slavery in South Africa was but what you and I, and the man over the way would have made it had we lived in South Africa two hundred years ago. Slavery in its legal form was extinguished at the Cape about the year 1834. The English Government, who had at that time taken over the Colony, purchased and liberated all the slaves at the cost of £1,247,000. Official slavery passed away; but it left, as always, its indelible marks on the dominant race who had suffered from it. We shall deal later with its intellectual and emotional reaction on South Africa. We have now only time to consider one of its large legacies. Slavery bequeathed to the Boer, and to South Africa mainly through him, its large Half-caste population: a population which constitutes at once the most painful, the most complex, and--if any social problem were insoluble in the presence of human energy and sympathy, we might add--the most insoluble portion of our South African national problem. The bulk of that Half-caste population which to-day fills our Western towns and throngs upon our Western farms, and which is found scattered over the whole of South Africa, arose originally and mainly as the result of sexual intercourse between the Boer and his imported slaves; and also with such aboriginal Hottentots or Bushmen, as he obtained possession of.[28]