I have glanced at the treatment of the Griquas in the last page but one. Those people were the offspring of colonists by Hottentot women, who finding themselves treated as an inferior race by their kinsmen of European blood, and prevented from acquiring property in land, or any fixed property, fled from contumely and oppression to the native tribes.
Amongst the vast mass of colonial crime, that of the treatment of the half-breed race by their European fathers constitutes no small portion. Everywhere this unfortunate race has been treated alike; in every quarter of the globe, and by every European people. In Spanish America it was the civil disqualification and social degradation of this race that brought on the revolution, and the loss of those vast regions to the mother country. In our East Indies, what thousands upon thousands of coloured children their white fathers have coolly abandoned; and while they have themselves returned to England with enormous fortunes, and to establish new families to enjoy them, have left there their coloured offspring to a situation the most painful and degrading—a position of perpetual contempt and political degradation. In our West Indies how many thousands of their own children have been sold by their white fathers, in the slave-market, or been made to swelter under the lash on their own plantations. Here, in South Africa, this class of descendents were driven from civilization to the woods and the savages, and a miserable and savage race they became. It was not till 1800 that any attempts were made to reclaim them, and then it was no parental or kindred feeling on the part of the colonists that urged it; it was attempted by the missionaries, who, as in every distant scene of our crimes, have stepped in between us and the just vengeance of heaven, between us and the political punishment of our own absurd and wicked policy, between us and the miserable natives. Mr. Anderson, their first missionary, found them “a herd of wandering and naked savages, subsisting by plunder and the chase. Their bodies were daubed with red paint, their heads loaded with grease and shining powder, with no covering but the filthy caross over their shoulders. Without knowledge, without morals, or any traces of civilization, they were wholly abandoned to witchcraft, drunkenness, licentiousness, and all the consequences which arise from the unchecked growth of such vices. With his fellow-labourer, Mr. Kramer, Mr. Anderson wandered about with them five years and a half, exposed to all the dangers and privations inseparable from such a state of society, before they could induce them to locate where they are now settled.”