rtial mind will find little or nothing to justify
any such imputation on either party. Another is, that the allegation
that a calamity was inevitable is one so easy to make and so hard to
refute that it is constantly employed to close an embarrassing
discussion. You cannot argue with a fatalist, any more than with a
prophet. Nations whose conscience is clear, statesmen who have foresight
and insight, do not throw the blame for their failures upon Destiny. The
chieftain in Homer, whose folly has brought disaster, says, "It is not I
who am the cause of this: it is Zeus, and Fate, and the Fury that
walketh in darkness." "It could not have been helped anyhow," "It was
bound to come"--phrases such as these are the last refuge of despairing
incompetence.

The hypothesis that the Dutch all over South Africa were leagued for the
overthrow of British power is so startling that it needs to be supported
by wide and weighty evidence. Is such evidence forthcoming? It has not
been produced. One who has not been in South Africa since 1895 dare not
rely on his own observation to deny the allegation. But neither can
Englishmen at home accept the assertions of partisans in South Africa,
the extravagance of whose language shows that they have been carried
away by party passion.

The probabilities of the case are altogether against the hypothesis, and
support the view of a temperate writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ for
October, who describes it as "a nightmare." What are these
probabilities?

The Dutch in the Cape had been loyal till December 1895, and had indeed
been growing more and more loyal during the last fifteen years. The
Africander Bond had shaken itself free from the suspicions once
entertained of its designs. Its leader, Mr. Hofmeyr, was conspicuously
attached to the Imperial connection, and was, indeed, the author of a
well-known scheme for an Imperial Customs Union. Even after December,
1895, its indignation at the attack on the Transvaal had not affected
the veneration of the Dutch party for the British Crown, so warmly
expressed in 1897. In 1898 the Cape Assembly, in which there was a Dutch
majority led by a Ministry supported by the Bond, voted unanimously a
large annual contribution to Imperial naval defence. Every effort was
made by Mr. Hofmeyr and by the Prime Minister of the Cape to induce the
Transvaal to make concessions which might avert war. As regards the Free
State, its Dutch burghers had been for many years on