isappeared ... never has the necessity for a policy
of a colonial and republican union been greater; now the
psychological moment has arrived; now our people have
awakened all over South Africa; a new glow illumines our
hearts; let us lay the foundation-stone of a real United
South Africa on the soil of a pure and all-comprehensive
national sentiment."]

[Sidenote: Effects of the raid.]

We are now in a position to sum up the main features of the situation
in South Africa as Lord Milner found it. British administration,
controlled from Downing Street, had quickly led to what Sir George
Grey called the dismemberment of European South Africa. The Imperial
Government, having found out its mistake, had endeavoured to regain
the lost solidarity of the European communities and its authority over
them, by bringing the Republics into a federal system under the
British Crown. It had been thwarted in this endeavour by the military
resistance of the Boers in the Transvaal, and the fear of a like
resistance on the part of the Dutch population throughout South
Africa. Its impotency had invited, and in part justified, the efforts
made by local British initiative to solve the problem of South African
unity on South African lines, but in a manner consistent with the
maintenance of British supremacy. The early success of these efforts,
prosecuted mainly through the agency of Rhodes, had been obliterated
by the Jameson Raid. All attempts to secure the reunion of South
Africa under the British flag having failed alike under Imperial and
local British initiative, the way was open for the Afrikander
nationalists once more to put forward the alternative plan of a united
South Africa under its own flag, which they had formulated in the year
immediately following the retrocession of the Transvaal.

In proportion as the friends and supporters of British supremacy were
discredited and depressed by the catastrophe of the Raid, the
advocates and promoters of Afrikander nationalism were emboldened and
encouraged. It was not Sir Gordon Sprigg, the Prime Minister of the
Cape who succeeded the discredited Rhodes (January 13th, 1896), but
Mr. Hofmeyr, the veteran leader of the Afrikander Bond, that dictated
the policy which Lord Rosmead must pursue to re-establish the
integrity of the Imperial Government in the minds of its Dutch
subjects. At the next presidential election in the Free State (Marc