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By Root 3650 0

of North America, with excited citizens pushing exuberantly into the interior, was discouraged in South Africa. Always the Lords XVII preached caution, a holding back lest rambunctious elements like the Van Doorns stray so far afield that they could not easily be disciplined. If one major charge could be leveled against the Compagnie, it was that it restricted normal growth. The borders which should have extended to logical boundaries, perhaps the Zambezi, as Dr. Linnart suggested, never did, which meant that the generic entity never came into being. Absentee businessmen, seeking only profit, do not generate a sense of manifest destiny; indeed, they fear it lest it create movements that get out of hand, and without this spiritual urge, no nation can achieve the limits to which geography, history, philosophy and hope entitle it. Because of Compagnie policy, rigorously enforced through sixteen decades, South Africa remained a truncated state, with only a few single-minded pioneers like the Van Doorns eager to dare the unknown.

Comparison with North American development was inescapable. In 1806, when the English assumed final control, South Africa had 26,000 white settlers. Canada, which had been started at about the same time as Cape Town and on less favorable soil, had 250,000, and the young United States more than 6,000,000. Mexico, a century older than South Africa, had 885,000. The main reason was simple: the Lords XVII were so reluctant to allow any immigration from which they could not immediately profit that during the entire eighteenth century they permitted only 1,600 new settlers to land! Sixteen newcomers a year cannot keep any new society healthy, or an old one, either.

But the Lords XVII were not entirely to blame, for on the rare occasions when they did advocate immigration, the response from those already living at the Cape was uniformly negative. 'It is absolutely impossible,' those holding land reported, 'to introduce any more whites into the country because they could find no livelihood.' What this really meant was that positions of advantage already filled by those in place would not be shared. There were no vacancies for the tough, impoverished migrant seeking a new country and a new chance, because the work that such people would normally start with was already being done by slaves.

In the time it took the cautious Lords XVII to approve inward movement of a hundred miles, settlers in North America had penetrated a thousand. While the Compagnie grudgingly allowed the establishment of a few small towns like Stellenbosch and Swellendam relatively close to the Cape, the free French and English settlers were already building communities like Montreal and Detroit far inland, thus laying the foundation for further movement westward.

It was not that the Dutch were commercially minded and the English not; had the English merchants been allowed to dominate North America they might have duplicated the folly of the Dutch, but English commercialism was never free to dictate to their colonies the way the Compagnie did.

Wherein lay the difference? The Dutch system of government not only permitted but encouraged its businessmen to rule without supervision, whereas the English government, which started in the same direction, quickly turned matters over to Parliament, a free press, and the innate longing for freedom of its citizens overseas. English businessmen might have wanted to ape the Dutch precedent, but the institutions of freedom forestalled them.

In no respect did the Dutch deficiency show itself more clearly than in the field of education and the dissemination of culture. Because the population was meager and dispersed over thousands of square miles, the development of large schools was impractical, and those that were attempted in the towns were atrocious. On the veld, where countless children like the Van Doorns grew up, education was left to a group of vagabond itinerants with only a meager knowledge of reading and writing. Usually discharged servants of the Compagnie, these inept clerks roamed from farm