SOUTH AFRICAN EXPANSION AND UNION 187 
very people whose cotperation they needed. The Home 
Government, for instance, showed so much interest in the 
welfare of the native tribes and gave so much more credence 
to the testimony of the missionaries than to the reports of its 
regular officials during the first thirty years of British rule at 
the Cape, that any resident there — British or foreign — 
might well have believed that the philanthropic ambitions of 
the English nation were of far more importance than the 
welfare and progress of its colonies. 
When Lord Charles Somerset, the first regular British 
Governor, arrived at Cape Town in 1814, he found himself 
ruler of an unprogressive, ill-developed, and poorly protected 
region of some 120,000 square miles, with a population of 
60,000, of whom 17,000 were free Hottentots, 13,000 slaves, 
and about 30,000 whites. The majority of the last-named 
were Dutch settlers who had won their own homes through a 
constant struggle with nature and were living in imminent 
danger from the warlike natives of the North. They were 
slave-owners and their occupation was chiefly agriculture, 
viticulture, and stock-raising. They lived on widely scat- 
tered farms which were worked indifferently; but they were 
closely bound together by common ideals, language, and 
customs, as well as by a natural instinct of self-preservation 
and a suspicion of all government, with which they always 
associated corruption and autocracy. In spite of the demo- 
cratic character of their local institutions and their general 
belief in the freedom of the individual, they had no desire to 
see political equality extended either to the blacks or to the 
incoming foreigners. 
No regard, however, was paid by the new rulers either to 
their preferences or to their beliefs. The British considered 
that the will of the master was the dominating factor in the 
situation, and began the anglicizing of the colony at once. 
In 1820, the first large installment — approximately 4000 —