But it’s a case of the proof of the pudding.  If this scheme for a general rising existed, why is not the Colony in arms now?  What do you think the answer to that is?  Why, that the plot did indeed exist and had been carefully matured, and that it would have come off all right if the Boers had marched boldly south; but that, for some unknown reason, their hearts failed them at the last moment, and they didn’t dare go on and reap what they had sown.  “If only they had marched on Cape Town, the whole Colony would have risen.”

Doesn’t it sometimes occur to you that, when his own interests are concerned, the Boer is a tolerably wide-awake gentleman, and that he knows how to look after those interests of his almost as well as we can teach him?  Are you prepared to believe of him:  first, that he laid down and organised this vast conspiracy; second, that he deliberately armed himself to the teeth with a view of carrying it out; third, that he chose his own time for war and declared it when he thought the moment was ripe; fourth, that he gained advantages to begin with, and had the Colony at his feet; and fifth, that he was seized with a sudden paralysis at the last moment, and found himself unable to march ahead and gather in the recruits who were on tip-toe to join him?  No, no.  If the plot existed, why didn’t the plot work?  It had every chance.

I will tell you what there was.  There were a number of appeals and letters (some of them I have seen) from families in the north to their relations in the Colony, praying for sympathy, and perhaps for active help.  But these were merely personal appeals.  There is no hard and fast line, so far as the people are concerned, between the Colony, Orange Free State, and Transvaal.  The same big families, or clans almost, have their branches in all three, and probably there is not a family of any consequence in either that has not a number of relations in the other two.  Consequently as war drew closer the excitement and anxiety it caused spread southward from family to family.  There was a good deal of sympathy felt, no doubt, by the Dutch in the Colony for their relations farther north, and there has been surreptitious help, information given, and sympathy.  But there the matter has usually ended.  There have been very few recruits, and there never was an organised conspiracy.

It is curious to notice how the several sections of the Dutch were picked up just as they were laid down.  The most determined spirits of all, the most bitter against English rule, the irreconcilables, had fought their way farthest north, and formed the Transvaal.  South of them came the Orange Free State, just across the Colony border—­independent, but not so bitter; while in the Colony itself remained all those weaker brethren whose hearts had failed them in the Great Trek days, and who had remained under our government.