.

Conferences were convened with the objects of coming to agreements for
the establishment of a general South African Customs Union, and for
adjusting railway tariffs upon fair bases and a more reliable permanency
of rates suggesting reciprocal terms advantageous to the Republics.
These efforts also proved fruitless through similar opposition.

The Afrikaner Bond party, as the reader will understand, had ranged
itself against all such attempts, whilst successfully masking its own
object all the time.

Other differences, which, with a friendly and united spirit, were
capable of easy adjustment, were welcomed by that party as grist to its
mill in order to widen the gulf and to increase the tension.

Besides the chagrin over the failure of its peace policy, the British
Cabinet had finally to admit itself confronted with a very real and
ominous national peril, face to face with the South African Medusa,
Afrikanerdom, defying Great Britain in preconcerted aggression and
revolt. That apparition was all the more startlingly disquieting because
of the suddenness with which the magnitude of the menace and its wide
perspectives had begun to expand into clearer view. It was interesting
to note how the English ministry responded to the call upon its
fortitude; the terrifying apparition did not seem to petrify that body
of men, despite the galling handicapping consequences through the
opposition of part of the nation, which was indeed tantamount to
encouraging South African rebels and usurpers.

BOND PRESS PROPAGANDA--SECRET SERVICE--TRADE RIVALRIES

The Bond leaders in Holland and South Africa had at an early stage acted
upon Stuart Mill's recognised saying, "that conviction in a cause is of
more potent avail than mere interest in it." Among those leaders there
was no lack of men of erudition and of psychological science, than whom
no one knew better the prime importance of ensuring uniformity of
convictions among the Boers and their partisans, and that the public
mind needs to be framed and trained so as to view the Boer cause as just
and that of the English as odiously wicked. They knew how indispensable
the Press is for attaining those objects, how journalism is capable of
plausibly representing black as white and to convince people so--that,
in fact, it is on occasion an agency of persuasion more potent than
armies are. Its needs are unscrupulous pens and ample payments. For
money is the sinews of journalism as w