Note 64 — Chapter VI · THE BOER AND HIS REPUBLICS

To prevent misunderstanding, it is necessary to state that the term Boer, like the term Highland clansman, is more than a mere designation of race. Had Scott been asked to describe a typical Highland clansman, he would at once have described him with certain manners, ideas, virtues and wants, forming an absolutely true picture of the ancient clansman, which yet might not in any way apply to the Duke of Argyle or other cultured descendant of the Highlander, who, though being the Chief of a Highland clan, and possessing possibly no drop of foreign blood, would yet belong to a wholly different type of civilization. Probably not one half of the descendants of the Boers are Boers to-day, in the sense of speaking only the Taal and abiding by seventeenth-century manners and customs; and in twenty-five years there will not, we regret to think, be a Boer born in South Africa, though there will be more than half a million South Africans of Dutch-Huguenot descent. Serious political miscalculation is the result of the misconception that all Dutch-Huguenot South Africans are primitive Boers. In childhood we remember having heard that a Scotch Highlander was coming on a visit; and our disappointment when, instead of a clansman, speaking Gaelic, wearing a kilt, and playing the bagpipes, a delicate young man, much addicted to reading Tennyson and playing Beethoven, appeared, was probably much like that which awaits the foreigner who still in all South African Dutchmen expects to see the Boer.