y.

The position which Lord Milner had taken up was impregnable. What is
the good of your loyalty, he said in effect to the Cape Dutch, if you
refuse to help us in the one thing needful? And this the one thing of
all others the justice of which you Afrikanders should feel--that the
Transvaal should "assimilate its institutions ... and the tone and
temper of its administration, to those of the free communities of
South Africa such as this Colony and the Orange Free State."

The impact of these words was tremendous. The weight behind them was
the weight of inevitable truth.

A week later Mr. J. X. Merriman wrote to President Steyn to beg him to
urge President Krueger to be careful. Under date March 11th, 1898, he
says:

"You will, no doubt, have seen both Sir Alfred Milner's speech at
Graaf Reinet and the reported interview with Mr. Rhodes in _The
Cape Times_. Through both there runs a note of thinly veiled
hostility to the Transvaal and the uneasy menace of trouble
ahead....

"Yet one cannot conceal the fact that the greatest danger to the
future lies in the attitude of President Krueger and his vain hope
of building up a State on a foundation of a narrow, unenlightened
minority, and his obstinate rejection of all prospect of using
the materials which lie ready to his hand to establish a true
Republic on a broad Liberal basis. The report of recent
discussions in the Volksraad on his finances and their
mismanagement fill one with apprehension. Such a state of affairs
cannot last. It must break down from inherent rottenness, and it
will be well if the fall does not sweep away the freedom of all
of us.

"I write in no hostility to republics; my own feelings are all in
the opposite direction.... Humanly speaking, the advice and
good-will of the Free State is the only thing that stands between
the South African Republic and a catastrophe."[37]

[Footnote 37: Cd. 369.]

[Sidenote: Sprigg and the Bond.]

Still more striking and salutary was the effect produced upon the
British population in the Cape Colony. All who were not utterly abased
by the yoke of Bond domination stood upright. Those whose spirit had
been cowed by the odium of the Raid took heart. Never had the
essential morality of England's dealings with the Dutch been
vindicated more triumphantly. The moral right of the Power which had
done justice