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.

The British Government did not view very seriously the information it received regarding the Bond menace until the definite action of the Transvaal Government partially opened its eyes prior to the Johannesburg revolt.  The hope was, however, still clung to in an undefined way that patience and forbearance would yet overcome Boer prejudice and disperse racial antipathies, and with characteristic self-confidence as well, things were allowed to drift rather out of hand.

The two Republics had been de facto allied some time before the Johannesburg crisis in 1895.  Both were then already provided with very abundant armaments of up-to-date types, with equipments and preparations far and away above any conceivable needs except indeed for a coup d’etat against British supremacy and to sustain a Colonial revolt.

On the occasion of the Jameson incursion the Orange Free State promptly appeared near the scene with best equipped mounted Boer commandoes and artillery to assist the Transvaal if needed.

Before 1881 and some time subsequently there had been continued progress towards the assimilation of the English and Boer races in South Africa.  This was marred by Afrikaner Bond doctrines and intrigues proceeding from a Hollander coterie, the formula being “Afrika voor de Afrikaners”—­the aims including the usurpation of British authority in the Colonies, supremacy of the Boer nation under one great Republican federation, and an affiliated status with Holland which should restore that people, all to the prejudice of England, to a political and economic significance and power surpassing its former epoch of European and Colonial eminence.  As to the incentives to the Boer nation, these were principally the plunder of capital investments and land conquests, which the people had learnt to consider legitimate and in fact incumbent as a duty to themselves and descendants.

The means employed in that conspiracy were a subtle, so to say, occult propaganda to seduce a simple people to false convictions, to induce the creation of gigantic armaments, a secret service employing at a vast cost journalism, emissaries, and agencies, to gain partisans and allies outside South Africa, the Transvaal mint to coin the sinews of war from the appropriation of the mines and their output, the dynamite factory (that Bond corner-stone for manufacturing ammunition[11]), a system of immigration from Holland towards supplanting the English factor and to introduce auxiliaries.