This disease attacks wild animals too.  During our residence at Chonuan great numbers of tolos, or koodoos, were attracted to the gardens of the Bakwains, abandoned at the usual period of harvest because there was no prospect of the corn (’Holcus sorghum’) bearing that year.  The koodoo is remarkably fond of the green stalks of this kind of millet.  Free feeding produced that state of fatness favorable for the development of this disease, and no fewer than twenty-five died on the hill opposite our house.  Great numbers of gnus and zebras perished from the same cause, but the mortality produced no sensible diminution in the numbers of the game, any more than the deaths of many of the Bakwains who persisted, in spite of every remonstrance, in eating the dead meat, caused any sensible decrease in the strength of the tribe.

The farms of the Boers consist generally of a small patch of cultivated land in the midst of some miles of pasturage.  They are thus less an agricultural than a pastoral people.  Each farm must have its fountain; and where no such supply of water exists, the government lands are unsalable.  An acre in England is thus generally more valuable than a square mile in Africa.  But the country is prosperous, and capable of great improvement.  The industry of the Boers augurs well for the future formation of dams and tanks, and for the greater fruitfulness that would certainly follow.

As cattle and sheep farmers the colonists are very successful.  Larger and larger quantities of wool are produced annually, and the value of colonial farms increases year by year.  But the system requires that with the increase of the population there should be an extension of territory.  Wide as the country is, and thinly inhabited, the farmers feel it to be too limited, and they are gradually spreading to the north.  This movement proves prejudicial to the country behind, for labor, which would be directed to the improvement of the colony, is withdrawn and expended in a mode of life little adapted to the exercise of industrial habits.  That, however, does not much concern the rest of mankind.  Nor does it seem much of an evil for men who cultivate the soil to claim a right to appropriate lands for tillage which other men only hunt over, provided some compensation for the loss of sustenance be awarded.  The original idea of a title seems to have been that “subduing” or cultivating gave that right.  But this rather Chartist principle must be received with limitations, for its recognition in England would lead to the seizure of all our broad ancestral acres by those who are willing to cultivate them.  And, in the case under consideration, the encroachments lead at once to less land being put under the plow than is subjected to the native hoe, for it is a fact that the Basutos and Zulus, or Caffres of Natal, cultivate largely, and undersell our farmers wherever they have a fair field and no favor.