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.
The strange, gentle, slow and somewhat dreamy element, which forms so important a charm in the character of the Boer, is by no means peculiar to the Dutch South African. It is a quality which is found almost quite as markedly in the grandsons of the British settlers of 1820 and other South African born men of English descent, and is especially marked in many of the young English farmers in the Eastern and Frontier districts, who form the flower of our English population, and who are often South Africans of the third generation. It is by this peculiar mental attitude more even than by their muscular build and prominent bony structure, that one tells almost invariably and without fail the South African born man of whatever descent from the foreigners and newcomers who fill our seaports and mining centres. It has in it something slightly reminiscent of the Italian _dolce far niente_, and partly finds expression in the Dutch motto of the Free State: "_Wacht een bietje: alles zal recht kom_" (Wait a little: all will come right); but it differs wholly from the Italian quality, in that this gentleness and slowness covers almost invariably a power of stern, persistent, concentrated emotion which we have not found equally common in the Italian. It takes on the average five times as long to rouse the African-born man into action and powerful emotion as the average foreigner of English or any other nationality; and it takes ten times as much to pacify him again!