The Hollander coterie may plead patriotism which pointed to the duty of using the tempting opportunity presented in South Africa in saving Holland from national submersion and political extinction by means of the Boer nation, but against this stands the unparalleled vileness of expedients and the treacherous deceptions employed to attain that object. It involved the wholesale seduction of one section of that nation into sedition and rebellion against a most beneficent and just Government under which they prospered and enjoyed the highest conceivable degree of liberty and even special privileges, and of pitting the other section into hostility and war against a Power which meant nothing else than peace and amity towards them, thus placing both into a position of risk to forfeit all their prosperity, apart from the inevitable horrors of a war evoked by their rapacious and murderous Hollander malice.
The Bond scientists in Holland had fully persevered in their craftily laid programme. After having succeeded in producing race hatred between Boer and English, the next step had been to convince the Boer leaders and the people of the inevitableness of a contest for ensuring the supremacy of the Afrikaners, coupled with the absolute necessity of the complete expulsion of the entire British element. As arguments were adduced that the British element had proved itself unassimilable and irreconcilable, its retention in South Africa would necessitate continuous provisions to keep it in a state of subjection. The existence of such conditions would be inconsistent and incompatible with the true ideal liberty as intended for the whole of South Africa, and which must be linked with all-round equality and fraternity. The presence of a British factor would be an unsurmountable bar to that consummation, hence the necessity of its total removal.
The Bond leaders are the next in guilt; with these the incentive is principally ambition, which, by degrees, became mis-shaped into a specious patriotism. It is known how an ardently desired object pursued for a long period is apt to so monopolize and infatuate the mind as to totally vitiate and pervert the sense of discernment between right and wrong, both as to the legitimacy of the object and the means to be employed for its attainment. As the realization remains deferred and the efforts are increased, the object from being considered legitimate is by degrees invested with merit, a halo of virtue is added to the aspect, its pursuit is viewed as a duty by fair or by questionable means, the end justifying the latter. All, it is said, is fair in love and warfare. This diagnosis appears particularly applicable to President Krüger and State Secretary F.W. Reitz, both men of sincere piety (perhaps also to Mr. Schreiner), who would have abandoned their project and renounced and repudiated the Afrikaner Bond if ever they had doubted its legitimacy of principle. So also with most of the other Boer leaders and their clergy too. The agencies must have been exceedingly subtle, and the jugglery and artifice superhuman, to operate such processes of reasoning, such deception and aberration in honest-minded and even godly persons.
As to the bulk of the Boer people, they are simply led by their chiefs and superiors, in whom they repose unquestioning confidence. They go unreasoningly with the stream of opinion under the firm belief that all is divinely sanctioned, including rebellion and violence, and blindly obey their call, considering their cause analogous to that of the Jews of old, who were enjoined to spoil the Egyptians and then to pass over and conquer their land of promise. No papal bull of indulgence ever freed people's consciences more than the Boer people now feel in regard to the warfare in which they are engaged.
RÉSUMÉ
The Boers in the Cape Colonies have been prospering in a marked degree since the British accession in 1814, enjoying ideal liberty and good government upon perfect equality with the English colonists.
The people of the Orange Free State fared equally well under best relations with the British Government up to the outbreak of the present war.
In the Transvaal the Boers were more handicapped, being furthest removed from profitable Cape connections, and having to cope with powerful hostile tribes within their border. The most redoubtable, under Secoecoenie, was subdued during the British occupation in 1878. Then followed the short war of 1880, with the voluntary retrocession and peace of January, 1881. All appeared to progress remarkably well for about ten years after, until the irrational treatment by the Boers of British subjects in the Transvaal furnished the first cause of friction, and engendered at last the Johannesburg crisis with the Jameson incursion, followed by four years' vain attempts on the part of England to bring about satisfactory and peaceful relations.
The Afrikaner Bond had been inaugurated some thirty years ago, under the mask of a constitutional organization, professing loyalty to England; that body had succeeded in hiding its object, which was no less than the expulsion from South Africa of all that is English, and which object was brutally avowed since the outbreak of the war by declarations in the Press and by incendiary speeches of Colonial Bond leaders and members of the Cape Parliament.