h the Bond's profession of loyalty--and with
characteristic irony the third reading of the Navy Contribution Bill
was eventually passed, a year later, without a division in the
Legislative Assembly by a Ministry[34] placed in office by Bond votes
for the declared purpose of opposing the policy of the Imperial
Government on the one question--the reform of the Transvaal
Administration--upon the issue of which depended the maintenance of
British supremacy in South Africa.

[Footnote 33: Sir Gordon Sprigg's long service as a minister
of the Crown fully entitled him to this honour; nor was his
presence rendered any the less desirable by the fact that Sir
Henry de Villiers, the Chief Justice, was also attending the
Jubilee in England.]

[Footnote 34: The Schreiner Ministry.]

[Sidenote: Rhodes's position.]

But circumstances of deeper significance contributed to deprive the
Sprigg Ministry of the support of the Bond, causing its majority to
dwindle, and driving Sir Gordon himself, in an increasing degree, into
the opposite camp. The British population for the first time showed a
tendency to organise itself in direct opposition to the Bond. As Sir
Gordon Sprigg grew more Imperialist, the Progressive party was formed
for parliamentary purposes; while for the purpose of combating the
Afrikander nationalist movement in general an Imperialist
organisation, called the South African League, was established with
the avowed object of maintaining British supremacy in South Africa.
Mr. Cecil Rhodes, immediately after the Raid, announced his intention
of taking no further part in the politics of the Cape Colony, and of
devoting himself, for the future, to the development of Rhodesia. But
upon his return from England, after giving evidence before the
Committee of Inquiry into the Raid, he was received with so much
warmth by the British population at Capetown in July, 1897, that he
had retracted this decision, and determined to assume the same
position of real, though not nominal, leadership of what was
afterwards the Progressive party as Mr. Hofmeyr held in the Bond. Mr.
Rhodes's return to political life, following, as it did, upon the
report of the Committee of Inquiry, aroused the most bitter hostility
against him on the part of his former associates in the Bond. And the
Sprigg Ministry, by their increasing reliance upon the new party of
which he was the leader, incurred the dis