Besides the chagrin over the failure of its peace policy, the British Cabinet had finally to admit itself confronted with a very real and ominous national peril, face to face with the South African Medusa, Afrikanerdom, defying Great Britain in preconcerted aggression and revolt.  That apparition was all the more startlingly disquieting because of the suddenness with which the magnitude of the menace and its wide perspectives had begun to expand into clearer view.  It was interesting to note how the English ministry responded to the call upon its fortitude; the terrifying apparition did not seem to petrify that body of men, despite the galling handicapping consequences through the opposition of part of the nation, which was indeed tantamount to encouraging South African rebels and usurpers.

BOND PRESS PROPAGANDA—­SECRET SERVICE—­TRADE RIVALRIES

The Bond leaders in Holland and South Africa had at an early stage acted upon Stuart Mill’s recognised saying, “that conviction in a cause is of more potent avail than mere interest in it.”  Among those leaders there was no lack of men of erudition and of psychological science, than whom no one knew better the prime importance of ensuring uniformity of convictions among the Boers and their partisans, and that the public mind needs to be framed and trained so as to view the Boer cause as just and that of the English as odiously wicked.  They knew how indispensable the Press is for attaining those objects, how journalism is capable of plausibly representing black as white and to convince people so—­that, in fact, it is on occasion an agency of persuasion more potent than armies are.  Its needs are unscrupulous pens and ample payments.  For money is the sinews of journalism as well as of war, whether the projectiles be charged with lyddite or with lies, whether it is bullets or throwing dust into people’s eyes.

We have seen how a few articles (for which a leading French paper received L100,000) were instrumental in enabling the Panama Canal Co. to swindle the French public of forty million pounds sterling, and more recently, where through Press agency it became feasible to a combination of Jesuitism and militarism to seduce by far the greater portion of the noble French nation into frenzied agitation and anti-Semitic excesses, and load the entire people with almost ineffaceable guilt in the matter of that unfortunate Dreyfus.  In its Press campaign the Afrikaner Bond employed several leading Colonial organs—­the Bloemfontein Express, the Pretoria Volksstem, the Standard and Diggers’ News of Johannesburg, and numerous papers of note abroad as well.  These were coached, in the usual masterly manner, sophisticating and perverting truth.  Whenever a lull occurred in treating one or other of the more salient questions, those South African papers would invariably contain—­especially in their Dutch columns—­aspersive articles,