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.

The present war has revealed these strata just as they were deposited.
The northern State was the leader and aggressor. The southern one, drawn
in by its fiercer neighbour, was still true to the cause. And so, too,
the Dutch of the Colony were exactly to-day where they had been sixty
years ago. They could no more join the war than they could join the
trek. And, in spite of individual appeals to relations, &c., you may be
sure that the northerners knew pretty accurately how the land lay. Their
own action shows this.

Therefore, I put aside utterly, so far as I am concerned, the Uitlander
and Dutch conspiracy arguments, of which one hears so much, as things
which, though they may occupy the attention of leading article writers
in London, yet are not convincing, and have no smack of reality to any
one who knows something about the Uitlanders from personal observation,
and something about the Boers and Boer life from personal observation. I
put these aside and come back to the only argument that will really
wash, that has no cla