But why not agree to arbitration, it will be asked, that peaceable method so strenuously appealed for by the Transvaal Government and advocated by her partisans, to adjust all differences, of which the suzerainty claim and the Uitlander question appeared to be the principal ones?  The reply is not that England was unwilling, but because the Transvaal was insincere, and the request was a cover for shameless duplicity, for, while it had been declared by the former that the claim to suzerainty would be left in abeyance and that infractions of convention which had been committed by the latter would be overlooked in consideration of future friendly relations and co-operation, the Transvaal Government in reality never for a moment meant to be content with less than British overthrow and complete Boer supremacy in South Africa, and efforts and intrigues were never relaxed, in concert with the Bond, to compass those objects.

AFRIKANER BOND GUILT IN GRADATIONS

The promiscuous details and incidents, together with the circumstantial and prima facie evidence thus far adduced in arraigning the Afrikaner Bond combination, point mostly to conditions existent before the war broke out.  We had the smoke before the conflagration—­it is a wonder how people could manage to ignore the menace.  Now the war torch is over us in its full luridness.

Ordinary fires, if not kindled, originate either from accident, spontaneous combustion, or incendiarism.  With war the origin may be traced to similar causes either singly or in combination, or, when we cannot hit the exact diagnosis, we explain it with a handy word and call it evolution, as we may do in the case of the present Anglo-Boer conflict.

We may for a moment review the material and then also the agencies and incentives which operated that evolution against harmony and peace, and to which the conflagration is due.  We have noted the legal acquisition of the Cape Colonies by Great Britain, the equally recognised occupation under treaties with England of the two Boer Republics, the English and Boer races in progress of friendly assimilation and in happy prosperity all over South Africa.  This was essentially the position in 1881, until it became gradually marred by an invidious element.  We have further noted the declining condition of Holland, its moribund language, and finally the prospects which South Africa presented for that nation’s restoration to powerful significance, the English factor only standing in the way.

The next aspect brings out the marring manifestations:  greed of land and of conquest with the Pretoria-Bloemfontein combination; malignant sedition in the Cape Colonies, urged by lust to participate more directly in the wealth of gold and diamonds in the north and to share general plunder—­both categories of covetousness merged into one purulent fester by men of conceited ambition, all cemented with collusion, but the whole of it devised, engineered, and operated by the most malignant agencies from Holland under the coaching of the evil one himself.