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88 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
For
generations the Dutch settler had been treading in the footsteps of
his forefathers without any wish to stride ahead. What they had done,
he would do if he could. No new way of working or living or thinking
was as good to his mind as the old way. The pioneer farmer and grazier
had often been constrained to pack all his goods on the backs of oxen
or in a wagon with his wife and children. A little hut of " wattle and
daub " sheltered the family. Rude frames of wood overlaid with raw hide
strips were their bedsteads, and sheepskins, their bedclothes. They
cooked their food on the coals of wood-fires or boiled it in an iron
pot. They cut their meat with clasp knives and drank from tin cups. A
big chest served them for a table. Their house floor was the bare
earth, unless a strip was covered with a wild beast's skin. Their
children were brought up from their birth in this habit of life and the
lack of comforts was not to them a privation. Their standard of living
was scarcely higher than that of the imported Guinea slaves who worked
for them, or of the native tribes that surrounded them. Their isolation
from civilized society and their life in the wilderness in familiar
contact with slaves and savages was inevitably degrading. When the
English took the Colony, there was not a bookstore or a single good
school in it, and outside of Cape Town almost the only tutors were
soldiers who were allowed to live with the farmers.1 Still
there was one sustaining and universal spirit which kept even the
rudest grazier from sinking to the barbaric level. They clung to the
God of Israel and to the Bible as God's revelation. They never wearied
of searching the Scriptures, and they prayed with the fervor and faith
of the old Covenanters. Their creed was the strait and narrow way of
Calvinism and the synod of Dordrecht, and they turned to the Old
Testament as confidingly as to the New for guidance. They recognized
the holding of slaves as a practice permitted to Israel, and they made
bond servants of the Hottentots in their apprenticeship contracts. In
their eyes the Bushmen were Ishmaelites and the Kafirs Philis-
1 "South Africa," George McCall Theal. "Handbook to South Africa," S. W. Silver & Co.
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