In the year following the Graaf Reinet
Congress, however, the "Farmers' Protection Association" was
amalgamated with the Bond in the Cape Colony, and the influence of Mr.
J. H. Hofmeyr led the joint organisation to adopt a modified
"programme." Mr. Hofmeyr, who was destined afterwards to assume the
undisputed headship of the Bond, was an economist as well as a
nationalist. He was intensely interested in the development of the
country districts, and he saw that the conditions of agriculture could
hardly be improved without the co-operation of the British and more
progressive section of the farming class. He also knew that an
organisation, professing to forward aims of avowed disloyalty, would
rapidly find itself in collision with the Cape Government. With the
growth of Mr. Hofmeyr's influence the policy, though not the aims, of
the Bond was changed. All declarations, such as the clause "under its
own flag," inconsistent with allegiance to the British Crown were
omitted from the official constitution, and its individual members
were exhorted to avoid any behaviour or expressions likely to prevent
Englishmen from joining the organisation. As early as 1884 the Bond
secured the return of twenty-five members to the Cape Parliament, and
it was their support that enabled the Upington Ministry to maintain
itself in office against an opposition which consisted of the main
body of the representatives elected by the British population; and
from this date onwards it was the recognised aim of Mr. Hofmeyr to
control the Legislature of the Colony by making it impossible for any
ministry to dispense with the support of the Bond members, although he
refrained from putting a ministry of Bondsmen into office. To have
done this latter might have united the British population and their
representatives in a solid phalanx, and endangered the success of the
effort to separate the British settlers in the country districts from
the more recent arrivals from England--mostly townsmen--which remained
a fruitful source of Afrikander influence up to the time of the
Jameson Raid. By representing the new British population, which
followed in the wake of the mineral discoveries, as "fortune-seekers"
and adventurers and not genuine colonists, the Bond endeavoured, not
merely to widen the natural line of cleavage between the townsman and
the countryman, but actually to detach the older British settlers from
sympathy with the mother country, and, by drawing