Identifier: southafric00colv (find matches)
Title: South Africa
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Colvin, Ian Duncan, 1877-1938
Subjects:
Publisher: London Edinburgh, T.C. & E.C. Jack
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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ced before us, but every one is to remain quiet andin peace. In short, we are frankly bored by all this hubbub, we are shopkeepers, not imperialists, and a man who tries to administer a country righteously in-stead of devoting himself to the meat supply of our ships is a confounded nuisance. Thus the Seventeen argued and thus the conspirators won. Van der Stel begged to be allowed to remain in the Cape if only for a year, as a forgotten burgher, but he was curtly told to get out; Huysing threatened him with a preposterous lawsuit; the lives of the remaining officials were made a burden by the mean triumph of the disaffected; without land they were helpless to provide even their own eatables and were robbed unmercifully; Huysing got the whole of the meat contract; the wool industry started by van der Stel disappeared, and the poor Hottentots were murdered and robbed and enslaved until there were none left but a few miserable landless and cattleless serfs on the farms of the burghers. The cause of152
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Huguenots Building their Homesteads THE HOUSE OF VAN DER STEL iniquity triumphed, and, as in revenge, the days of the Dutch East India Company were numbered. The reign of the van der Stels is the golden period of the Cape—the period of expansion, of discovery, of industry, of house-building, of land settlement. Stellenbosch, the Drakenstein, and Frenchhoek and the glorious Land of Waveren—all these valleys of orchard and cornland and vine were settled by the personal labours of these two great governors—and for their reward they were robbed, insulted, and abused by the very men whom they had benefited. In this respect they are not alone in the history of South Africa, as we shall see hereafter. Yet I will make bold to say that their names will remain, when those of their detractors past and present are forgotten. South Africa of the future will read its history aright, and will look back on the van der Stels as the two great statesmen who laid down the lines of the true policy—honesty, justi

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