Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is, in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the fellow nation.
With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears, it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker and the aboriginal races as still does exist.
There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We have never heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them. "I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once; "I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."