on
disaster.

Whilst remaining absolutely independent, the ties of blood,
relationship, and language point to Holland for a domestic base.

As to commerce, Germany, America, and other industrial nations
could more than fill the gap left by England, and such
connections should be cultivated as a potent means towards
obtaining foreign support to our cause and identification with
it.

If the mineral wealth of the Transvaal and Orange Free State
becomes established--as appears certain from discoveries already
made--England will not rest until these are also hers.

The leopard will retain its spots. The independence of both
Republics is at stake on that account alone, with the risk that
the rightful owners of the land will become the hewers of wood
and drawers of water for the usurpers.

There is no alternative hope for the peace and progress of South
Africa except by the total excision of the British ulcer.

Reliable signs are not wanting to show that our nation is
designed by Providence as the instrument for the recovery of its
rights, and for the chastisement of proud, perfidious
Albion."[19]

[Footnote 19: P. 64 _et seq._ of _The Origin of the
Anglo-Boer War Revealed_ (Hodder & Stoughton).]

These brief and disjointed sentences present in their shortest form
arguments and exhortations with which the Dutch population of the Free
State, the Transvaal, and the Cape Colony, were familiarised through
the Press, the pulpit, the platform, and through individual
intercourse and advocacy, from the time of the Retrocession in 1881
onwards. It is in effect the scheme of a Bond "worked out more in
detail by some friends at Bloemfontein," as published by Borckenhagen
in his paper, _The Bloemfontein Express_, on April 7th, 1881, to which
Du Toit, the founder of the Bond in the Cape Colony, referred in the
pamphlet, _De Transvaalse Oorlog_ (The Transvaal War), which he issued
from his press at the Paarl later on in the same year. The nationalist
creed, as thus formulated, was preached consistently in the Free
State; but in the Cape Colony it was modified by Hofmeyr to meet the
exigencies of Colonial politics.

None the less it was in the Cape Colony that the Bond, as a political
organisation, was destined to find its chief sphere of action. In the
Free State it was discouraged by President Brand, and in