They had spread themselves over an enormous tract of country, and were in close touch with kaffirs and bushmen, cattle-lifters using poisoned arrows.
Living in isolated families, they acquired, in the course of their unceasing struggle with their savage neighbours, not only their qualities of daring and warlike skill, but habits of cruelty and cunning as well.
3 .-- _Essentially a Man of War and Politics._ Between the Dutchman of Amsterdam, Haarlem, the Hague, or Rotterdam, installed in his comfortable dwelling, cultivating his tulips, priding himself upon his pictures, and drinking his beer, and the Boer, pure and simple, there is not the slightest analogy.
This Dr.Kuyper acknowledges.

The Boer population is a compound of Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Hugenots, Germans and Scotchmen.

Krueger and Reitz are of German, Joubert and Cronje, of French origin.

Here is what Dr.
Kuyper, himself, says of the Boers:-- "The word Boer signifies 'peasant,' but it would be a mistake to compare Boers with French peasants, English farmers, or even the settlers of America.

They are rather a _conquering race_, who established themselves among the Hottentots and Basutos, in the same manner that the _Normans, in the XIth Century, established themselves among the Anglo-Saxons_.