the best terms with
their English fellow-burghers and with the British Government. They had
nothing to gain by a racial conflict, and their President, who is
understood to have suggested the Bloemfontein Conference, as well as Mr.
Fischer, one of their leading statesmen, strove hard to secure peace
till immediately before war broke out.

There was, moreover, no prospect of success for an effort to overthrow
the power of Britain. The Dutch in the Colony were not fighting men
like their Transvaal brethren, and were, except for voting purposes,
quite unorganized. Those of the Free State were a mere militia, with no
experience of war, and had possessed, at least down to 1895, when I
remember to have seen their tiny arsenal, very little in the way of war
munitions. The Transvaal Boers were no doubt well armed and good
fighters, but there were after all only some twenty or twenty-five
thousand of them, a handful to contend against the British Empire. The
Transvaal Government was, moreover, from its structure and the capacity
of the men who composed it, if not indisposed to indulge in day-dreams,
at any rate unfit to prosecute so vast an enterprise.

There seems therefore to be no foundation in any facts which have so far
been made public for the belief in this "conspiracy of the Dutch race,"
or for the inevitableness of the imagined conflict.

The truth would appear to be that the Transvaal people did at one time
cherish the hope of extending their Republic over the wide interior.
They were stopped on the west in 1884. They were stopped on the north in
1890. They were stopped in their effort to reach the sea in 1894. After
that year British territory surrounded them on all sides except where
they bordered the Portuguese on the north-east. Many of them, including
the President, doubtless cherished the hope of some time regaining a
complete independence such as that of the Free State. Some ardent
spirits dreamt of a Dutch South African Republic with Pretoria for its
future capital; and there were probably a few men of the same visionary
type in the Colony and the Free State who talked in the same wild way,
especially after the Jameson invasion had stirred Dutch feeling to its
depths. But from such dreams and such talk it is a long step to a
"conspiracy of the Dutch over all South Africa." The possibility that
the Dutch element would some day or other prevail, a possibility to
which the slowness of British immigration and the