Press, and of the Bond leaders, was not
merely discouraging; at any hint of possible British action for the
improvement of the administrative conditions of the Transvaal, it took
a note of menace. "Hands off" the Transvaal: that was the sum and
substance of Bond policy.

Between the Jubilee despatch and the Graaf Reinet speech, then, the
Transvaal Government had shown that it had set its face definitely
against reform, and Lord Milner had had time to realise the true state
of political feeling in the Colony of which he was Governor. While
there was anger among the British at the hopeless situation in the
Transvaal, among the Dutch was a fixed determination not to allow the
Transvaal to be interfered with. And there was something else that
Lord Milner would have observed during his travels throughout the
Colony. It was the utter despondency of the British population, and
the condition of abasement to which they had been reduced. Nor can he
have failed to observe that everywhere among the British there was a
constant apology for the Raid; while, on the part of the Dutch, there
was no recognition of all that the British had done to wipe out its
stain and to mitigate its effects: in a word, that the moral conquest
of the Colony by the Dutch was practically complete.

[Sidenote: Milner at Graaf Reinet.]

It was with this accumulated evidence in his mind that Lord Milner
travelled down, on March 2nd, 1898, from Capetown to Graaf Reinet,
expecting to take part in a Governor's function of the ordinary sort
at the opening of the railway on the following day. The conventional
expressions of loyalty to the Queen, and the scarcely veiled hypocrisy
and defiance with which the Dutch reiterated them, at the time when
the whole weight of their influence was thrown against Great Britain
on the only South African question that really mattered, had become
nauseating even to his serene temper and generous disposition. He was
wearied, too, of receiving a frivolous or unfriendly reply from the
Pretoria Executive to the most reasonable proposals of the Imperial
Government. Late at night there was brought to him, in the train, a
copy of an address from the Graaf Reinet branch of the Afrikander
Bond, which was to be presented to him on the morrow. It contained, in
more than usually pointed language, a protest against "the charges of
disloyalty made against the Bond," and a request that the High
Commissioner would "convey to the Queen the exp