In itself acknowledging no single form of government as the only suitable form, and whilst acknowledging the form of government existing at present, [the Bond] means that the aim of our national development must be a united South Africa under its own flag.
Hofmeyr's influence.
And it was upon the basis of this "Programme of Principles" that the earliest Bond organisations were formed in the Transvaal, the Free State, and the Cape Colony. 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 them within the sphere of Afrikander nationalist aspirations, to make them share its own antagonism to British supremacy.
Merriman and the Bond.
But, in spite of the change of policy due to Mr. Hofmeyr, the old leaven of stalwart Bondsmen remained sufficiently in evidence to draw from Mr. J. X. Merriman—then a strong Imperialist in close association with Mr. J. W. Leonard—a striking rebuke. The speech in question was made, fittingly enough, at Grahamstown, the most "English" town in South Africa, in 1885. It was reprinted with complete appropriateness, in The Cape Times of July 10th, 1899. The struggle which Mr. Merriman had foreseen fourteen years before was then near at hand; while Mr. Merriman himself had become a member of a ministry placed in power by the Bond for the avowed purpose of "combating the British Government."
"The situation is a grave one," he said. "It is not a question of localism; it is not a question of party politics; but it is a question whether the Cape Colony is to continue to be an integral part of the British Empire.... You will have to keep public men up to the mark, and each one of you will have to make up his mind whether he is prepared to see this colony remain a part of the British Empire, which carries with it obligations as well as privileges, or whether he is prepared to obey the dictates of the Bond. From the very first time, some years ago, when the poison began to be instilled into the country, I felt that it must come to this—Is England or the Transvaal to be the paramount force in South Africa?... Since then that institution has made a show of loyalty, while it stirred up disloyalty.... Some people, who should have known better, were dragged into the toils under the idea that they could influence it for good, but the whole teaching of history goes to show that when the conflict was between men of extreme views and moderate men, the violent section triumphed. And so we see that some moderate men are in the power of an institution whose avowed object is to combat the British Government. In any other country such an organisation could not have grown; but here, among a scattered population, it has insidiously and successfully worked.... No one who wishes well for the British Government could have read the leading articles of the Zuid Africaan, and Express, and De Patriot, in expounding the Bond principles, without seeing that the maintenance of law and order under the British Crown and the object they have in view are absolutely different things. My quarrel with the Bond is that it stirs up race differences. Its main object is to make the South African Republic the paramount power in South Africa."
This was plain speaking. The rare insight revealed in such a sentence as this—"in any other country such an organisation could not have grown, but here, among a scattered population, it has insidiously and successfully worked"; the piquant incident of the reproduction of the speech on the eve of the war; the fact that the man who made this diagnosis was to drink the poison whose fatal effects he described so faithfully, was indeed to become the most bitter opponent of the great statesman that "kept South Africa a part of the British Empire,"—these things together make Mr. Merriman's Grahamstown speech one of the most curious and instructive of the political utterances of the period.
Change of Bond policy.
In the year following (1886) the Bond met officially, for the first and only time, as an inter-state organisation. Bloemfontein was the place of assemblage, and in the Central Bestuur, or Committee, the South African Republic, the Free State, and the Cape Colony were each represented by two delegates. This meeting revealed the practical difficulties which prevented the Cape nationalists from adopting the definitely anti-British programme of the Bond leaders in the Republics; and the conflict of commercial interests between the Cape Colony and the Transvaal, already initiated by the attempt of the latter to secure Bechuanaland in 1884-5, confirmed the Cape delegates in their decision to develop the Bond in the Cape Colony upon colonial rather than inter-state lines. The result of the divergences of aim manifested at Bloemfontein was speedily made apparent in the Cape Colony. In 1887 Mr. T. P. Theron, then Secretary of the Bond, delivered an address in which the new, or Hofmeyr, programme was formulated and officially adopted. In recommending the new policy to the members of the Bond, Mr. Theron made no secret of the nature of the considerations by which its leaders had been chiefly influenced.
"You must remember," he said, "that the eyes of all are directed towards you. The Press will cause your actions, expressions, and resolutions to be known everywhere. You cannot but feel how much depends on us for our nation and our country. If we must plead guilty in the past of many an unguarded expression, let us be more cautious and guarded for the future."