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Updated: June 7, 2025
The scene was one which is only possible in a half-civilised tropical land. Women, with the scantiest of clothing, or less, were washing linen, standing up to their waists in the water amongst the rocks, on which they thumped the clothes to be cleansed; laughing and chatting to each other incessantly.
The German Empire, with its population of sixty millions, educated by the State, disciplined by the State, relying on the State, and commanded by the State, is as potent in comparison with the less disciplined and less organised communities which surround it as was, in the third century before Christ, the Roman State in comparison with the disunited multitude of Greek cities, the commercial oligarchy of Carthage, and the half-civilised tribes of Gaul and Spain.
Now and again in the afternoon the tribesmen call to one another from the hill tops. They possess an extraordinary power of carrying their voices over a space that no European could span. I wonder whether the real secret of the powers ascribed to the half-civilised tribes of Africa has its origin in this gift.
The ascendancy of a junta of ignorant and designing Methodist elders in the councils of a half-civilised king, ruling with absolute sway over a nation just poised between barbarism and civilisation, and exposed by the peculiarities of its relations with foreign states to unusual difficulties, was not precisely calculated to impart a healthy tone to the policy of the government.
Indiscriminate killing, with all the passions and horrors that bloodshed evokes in the half-civilised, followed, and there was no more trouble just then in the disturbed districts, for there was none to make trouble.
They gave the relief that enabled me to carry on for years an incessant struggle, under great difficulties, to bring the mines into a paying state, continually hampered for want of sufficient capital, with most inadequate machinery, and all the annoyances, delays, and disappointments inevitable in carrying on such a precarious enterprise as gold-mining far in the interior of a half-civilised country.
"No, Bob," she said, with a blush, "when that time comes, we'll go to some lovely spot somewhere on the Rhine, where we shall be among civilised people, and where there will be no possibility of meeting these half-civilised races. But what do you think the Austrians will do?"
But Madame Lamotte found that the English were a little hypocrite. They were talking of justice and the Uitlanders, not of business. Monsieur was the first who had spoken to her of that. "The Boers are only half-civilised," remarked Soames; "they stand in the way of progress. It will never do to let our suzerainty go." "What does that mean to say? Suzerainty!" "What a strange word!"
Cut off, during half the year, from all the rest of the world, and visited only at long intervals by a few half-civilised traders, this little quadruple village was almost as independent and self-sustained as if it were situated on an island in the midst of the Arctic Ocean. Even its existence, to those who had no dealings with it, was a matter of question.
The latter are named myalls, by their half-civilised brethren who, indeed, hold them so much in dread, that it is seldom possible to prevail on anyone to accompany a traveller far into the unexplored parts of the country. At Segenhoe, on a former occasion, I met with a native but recently arrived from the wilds. December 2.
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