the Orange Free State had been for forty years, why then should they
arm? It was a difficult question, and one in answering which we find
ourselves in a region of conjecture and suspicion rather than of
ascertained fact. But the fairest and most unbiased of historians must
confess that there is a large body of evidence to show that into the
heads of some of the Dutch leaders, both in the northern republics
and in the Cape, there had entered the conception of a single Dutch
commonwealth, extending from Cape Town to the Zambesi, in which flag,
speech, and law should all be Dutch. It is in this aspiration that
many shrewd and well-informed judges see the true inner meaning of this
persistent arming, of the constant hostility, of the forming of ties
between the two republics (one of whom had been reconstituted and made
a sovereign independent State by our own act), and finally of that
intriguing which endeavoured to poison the affection and allegiance of
our own Dutch colonists, who had no political grievances whatever. They
all aimed at one end, and that end was the final expulsion of British
power from South Africa and the formation of a single great Dutch
republic. The large sum spent by the Transvaal in secret service
money--a larger sum, I believe, than that which is spent by the whole
British Empire--would give some idea of the subterranean influences at
work. An army of emissaries, agents, and spies, whatever their mission,
were certainly spread over the British colonies. Newspapers were
subsidised also, and considerable sums spent upon the press in France
and Germany.

In the very nature of things a huge conspiracy of this sort to
substitute Dutch for British rule in South Africa is not a matter which
can be easily and definitely proved. Such questions are not discussed
in public documents, and men are sounded before being taken into the
confidence of the conspirators. But there is plenty of evidence of
the individual ambition of prominent and representative men in this
direction, and it is hard to believe that what many wanted individually
was not striven for collectively, especially when we see how the course
of events did actually work towards the end which they indicated. Mr.
J.P. FitzPatrick, in 'The Transvaal from Within'--a book to which
all subsequent writers upon the subject must acknowledge their
obligations--narrates how in 1896 he was approached by Mr. D.P. Graaff,
formerly a member of the Cape Legislat