Equally repugnant and dangerous is England's policy towards the coloured races, whom she aims, for the sake of industrial profit, at elevating to equal rank with whites, in direct conflict with spiritual authority—a policy which incites coloured people to rivalry with their superiors, and can only end in common 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]
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 point of fact the British population was too insignificant a factor in the politics of the central republic to make it necessary to maintain a distinct organisation for the promotion of nationalist sentiment. In the Transvaal, again, the Bond maintained no regular organisation. And this for two reasons. Every burgher of the northern Republic was sufficiently animated by the anti-British sentiments which it was intended to promote; and the only "constitution" which the Transvaal Dutch would accept was one which embodied principles so flagrantly inconsistent with submission to British authority that it could not be adopted by the branches of the Bond in the Cape Colony without exposing its members to immediate prosecution for high treason.[20]
In the politics of the Cape Colony, however, the Bond became the predominant force; and any picture, however briefly sketched, of South Africa as it was when Lord Milner's administration commenced, must include some account of the origin and methods of this remarkable organisation.