[Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa by David Livingstone]@TWC D-Link book
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa

CHAPTER 2
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Numbers of them, who had formerly seen me about twelve hundred miles inland from the Cape, recognized me with the loud laughter of joy when I was passing them at their work in the Roggefelt and Bokkefelt, within a few days of Cape Town.

I conversed with them and with elders of the Dutch Church, for whom they were working, and found that the system was thoroughly satisfactory to both parties.

I do not believe that there is one Boer, in the Cashan or Magaliesberg country, who would deny that a law was made, in consequence of this labor passing to the colony, to deprive these laborers of their hardly-earned cattle, for the very cogent reason that, "if they want to work, let them work for us their masters," though boasting that in their case it would not be paid for.

I can never cease to be most unfeignedly thankful that I was not born in a land of slaves.

No one can understand the effect of the unutterable meanness of the slave-system on the minds of those who, but for the strange obliquity which prevents them from feeling the degradation of not being gentlemen enough to pay for services rendered, would be equal in virtue to ourselves.


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