_, and _Express_, and _De Patriot_,
in expounding the Bond principles, without seeing that the
maintenance of law and order under the British Crown and the
object they have in view are absolutely different things. My
quarrel with the Bond is that it stirs up race differences. Its
main object is to make the South African Republic the paramount
power in South Africa."

This was plain speaking. The rare insight revealed in such a sentence
as this--"in any other country such an organisation could not have
grown, but here, _among a scattered population_, it has insidiously
and successfully worked"; the piquant incident of the reproduction of
the speech on the eve of the war; the fact that the man who made this
diagnosis was to drink the poison whose fatal effects he described so
faithfully, was indeed to become the most bitter opponent of the great
statesman that "kept South Africa a part of the British
Empire,"--these things together make Mr. Merriman's Grahamstown speech
one of the most curious and instructive of the political utterances of
the period.

[Sidenote: Change of Bond policy.]

In the year following (1886) the Bond met officially, for the first
and only time, as an inter-state organisation. Bloemfontein was the
place of assemblage, and in the Central Bestuur, or Committee, the
South African Republic, the Free State, and the Cape Colony were each
represented by two delegates. This meeting revealed the practical
difficulties which prevented the Cape nationalists from adopting the
definitely anti-British programme of the Bond leaders in the
Republics; and the conflict of commercial interests between the Cape
Colony and the Transvaal, already initiated by the attempt of the
latter to secure Bechuanaland in 1884-5, confirmed the Cape delegates
in their decision to develop the Bond in the Cape Colony upon colonial
rather than inter-state lines. The result of the divergences of aim
manifested at Bloemfontein was speedily made apparent in the Cape
Colony. In 1887 Mr. T. P. Theron, then Secretary of the Bond,
delivered an address in which the new, or Hofmeyr, programme was
formulated and officially adopted. In recommending the new policy to
the members of the Bond, Mr. Theron made no secret of the nature of
the considerations by which its leaders had been chiefly influenced.

"You must remember," he said, "that the eyes of all are directed
towards you. The Press will cause you