At the risk of a tedious but very essential digression, something must be said here as to the motives with which the Boers had for many years been quietly preparing for war.  That the Jameson raid was not the cause is certain, though it probably, by putting the Boer Government into a strong position, had a great effect in accelerating matters.  What had been done secretly and slowly could be done more swiftly and openly when so plausible an excuse could be given for it.  As a matter of fact, the preparations were long antecedent to the raid.  The building of the forts at Pretoria and Johannesburg was begun nearly two years before that wretched incursion, and the importation of arms was going on apace.  In that very year, 1895, a considerable sum was spent in military equipment.

But if it was not the raid, and if the Boers had no reason to fear the British Government, with whom the Transvaal might have been as friendly as the Orange Free State had been for forty years, why then should they arm?  It was a difficult question, and one in answering which we find ourselves in a region of conjecture and suspicion rather than of ascertained fact.  But the fairest and most unbiased of historians must confess that there is a large body of evidence to show that into the heads of some of the Dutch leaders, both in the northern republics and in the Cape, there had entered the conception of a single Dutch commonwealth, extending from Cape Town to the Zambesi, in which flag, speech, and law should all be Dutch.  It is in this aspiration that many shrewd and well-informed judges see the true inner meaning of this persistent arming, of the constant hostility, of the forming of ties between the two republics (one of whom had been reconstituted and made a sovereign independent State by our own act), and finally of that intriguing which endeavoured to poison the affection and allegiance of our own Dutch colonists, who had no political grievances whatever.  They all aimed at one end, and that end was the final expulsion of British power from South Africa and the formation of a single great Dutch republic.  The large sum spent by the Transvaal in secret service money—­a larger sum, I believe, than that which is spent by the whole British Empire—­would give some idea of the subterranean influences at work.  An army of emissaries, agents, and spies, whatever their mission, were certainly spread over the British colonies.  Newspapers were subsidised also, and considerable sums spent upon the press in France and Germany.

In the very nature of things a huge conspiracy of this sort to substitute Dutch for British rule in South Africa is not a matter which can be easily and definitely proved.  Such questions are not discussed in public documents, and men are sounded before being taken into the confidence of the conspirators.  But there is plenty of evidence of the individual ambition of prominent and representative men in this direction, and it is hard to believe that what many