trust of its Dutch supporters
to a corresponding extent. In the meantime the Bond leaders had
adopted Mr. Philip Schreiner, who was not a member of the Bond, as
their parliamentary chief in the place of Rhodes, and this new
combination was strengthened by the accession of Mr. J. X. Merriman
and Mr. J. W. Sauer. Thus the opening months of the new year, 1898,
found the population of the Cape Colony grouping itself roughly, for
the first time, into two parties with definite and mutually
destructive aims. On the one side there was the Sprigg Ministry, now
almost exclusively supported by the British section of the Cape
electorate, soon to be organised on the question of "redistribution"
into the Progressive party, with Rhodes as its real, though not its
recognised, leader; and on the other there was the Bond party, with
Schreiner as its parliamentary chief and Hofmeyr as its real leader,
depending in no less a degree upon the Dutch population of the
Colony, and naturally opposed to an electoral reform that threatened
to deprive this population of its parliamentary preponderance. And in
a few months' time, as we shall see, the Schreiner-Bond coalition took
for its immediate aim the prevention of British interference in the
Transvaal; while the Progressive party came, no less openly, to avow
its determination to promote and support the action of the Imperial
Government in seeking to obtain redress for the Uitlander grievances.

The movements here briefly indicated were, of course, perfectly well
known to Lord Milner as constitutional Governor of the Colony. But at
Graaf Reinet he probes the situation too deeply, and speaks with too
authoritative a tone, to allow us to suppose that the remonstrance
which he then addressed to the Cape Dutch was based upon any sources
of knowledge less assured than his own observation and experience. For
the Graaf Reinet speech is not an affair of ministers' minutes or
party programmes; it is the straight talk of a man taught by eye and
ear, and informed by direct relationships with the persons and
circumstances that are envisaged in his words. To restate our
question, which among these facts of personal observation and
experience produced the change from the ready appreciation of the Cape
Dutch, shown in the Jubilee despatch, to the earnest remonstrance of
the Graaf Reinet speech? The historian cannot claim, like the writer
of creative literature, to exhibit the working of the human mind. In
th