these countries would assume a more fertile and healthy aspect in two
or three years. The soil is good; all that is wanted is concentrated
hard work, and the countries would surprise several people--the Boers,
for instance--by the extent of their agricultural wealth. There are,
of course, climatic disadvantages to contend against--prolonged
droughts are of common occurrence--but, as in other countries, the
farmer must take the bad with the good. The great thing with the Boer
is stock, and plenty of it. He does not care about anything else until
the rinderpest comes.

Comparisons are odious, but let us compare the Boer with the English
farmers. Should the harvests of the latter be destroyed (as in the
case of an entire county of farmers in England at one time), ruin
stares them in the face, showing that stock is of little moment. It is
different in the case of the Boer. Take his stock away from him, and
you deprive him of his daily bread. Of course, the facilities for
successful cultivation in England are different from those in the
Dutch Republics; at the same time, there is such a thing as
irrigation, and were this resorted to more generally, and a larger
area of land put under cultivation, the Boer farmer would be on a more
stable footing.

A somewhat erroneous deduction has been gleaned by many people from
guide-books, in which particulars are given respecting the limited
extent of arable land available, but guide-book makers mostly prefer
to guess at the figures rather than go to the trouble of ascertaining
the truth. Without further reference to the guide-books, it is
noteworthy that the possibilities of both the Transvaal and Free State,
from an agricultural point of view, are greatly under-estimated, the
fact being that a very small proportion of arable land is cultivated at