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. Other such means were: laws for admitting
auxiliaries to immediate full burgher rights and privilege to carry
arms, from which Uitlanders were rigorously excluded, the rabid campaign
proscribing the English language and fostering High Dutch instead (which
was much less understood by the entire Boer people, and much harder for
them to learn than English). To the above list of devices came the
exhaustive efforts to obtain an independent seaport for the Transvaal,
first at St. Lucia Bay, then at Delago