bodings aroused energetic
efforts to check rival interests. The prize was too valuable, and
increasing each year in importance. A dyke needed to be erected to stem
the English encroachments and to preserve and consolidate the Hollander
position of vantage. The ablest men in Holland and South Africa
exercised themselves with that task with an ardour impelled by jealous
hatred against the English and intensified by successive revelations of
more startling discoveries of gold and other mineral wealth in the
Transvaal. It was then, about thirty years ago, that a well-informed,
influential and unscrupulous coterie in Holland devised the fell
projects which developed into that potential association since known as
the Afrikaner Bond.

The building of the Transvaal railway lines brought other large
accessions of educated Hollanders, and as they were completed some
thousands more were added to serve as permanent staff. Dutch influence
was thus attaining strength to assert and consolidate its interests with
an expanding impulse. The monopolized railway company promoted
immigration from Holland by largely increasing the salaries to such of
the staff who were married. The Transvaal Government, under the advice
of their educational chief, Dr. Mansfeld, provided similar premiums to
secure married teachers from Holland and by raising the salaries of
married Hollander officials already placed. The Hollander population
attracted to the Transvaal since 1850, and which did not number above
500 in 1870, had increased by 1898 to fully 12,000, representing, as
ranged with the Boers, by far the largest factor of educated
intelligence, attached to and dependent upon the Government and its
staunch allies. The men received full burghership as a rule soon after
arrival, exempt from the formalities and probation prescribed by law.

Holland being the locality of the inception, I may say the ingestion, of
the Afrikaner Bond, one's thoughts are apt to retrace, by way of
contrast, that little nation's creditable past. The view presents those
dykes, monuments of labour's heroism; then that glorious resistance
against the mighty persecutor of religion, those unsurpassed
performances in the arena of culture, arts, and sciences, and that long
epoch of success in exploits of colonization, finance, and commerce.

"But view them closer, craft and fraud appear;
Even liberty itself is bartered here."--_Goldsmith_.[5]

One notes the placid landscape