d solve, and, indeed, can alone
solve, the most difficult and most persistent of the problems of
South Africa; how it would unite its white races as nothing else
can. The Dutch can never own a perfect allegiance merely to Great
Britain. The British can never, without moral injury, accept
allegiance to any body politic which excludes their motherland.
But British and Dutch alike could, without loss of integrity,
without any sacrifice of their several traditions, unite in loyal
devotion to an empire-state, in which Great Britain and South
Africa would be partners, and could work cordially together for
the good of South Africa as a member of that greater whole."[56]

[Footnote 56: _The Johannesburg Star_, April 1st, 1905.]

With Schreiner, and such as he, loyalty to the Crown was for the
moment the product of intellectual judgment or considerations of
policy. All, or almost all, the instinctive feelings, born of
pleasant associations with persons and places, which enter so largely
into the sentiment of patriotism seem to have drawn him, as they drew
his sister, Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner, into sympathy with the cause of
Afrikander nationalism. What his view was upon the particular issue
now agitating South Africa may be gathered from an answer which he
gave to a question put to him by Mr. Chamberlain in the course of the
inquiry into the Raid (1897):

MR. CHAMBERLAIN: I suppose your view is that the Imperial
Government should adopt the same policy as the Cape Government,
and should refrain from even friendly representations as not
being calculated to advance the cause of the Uitlanders?

MR. SCHREINER: Yes, decidedly, so far as purely internal concerns
are concerned.[57]

[Footnote 57: Proceedings of the Select Committee on British
South Africa (Q. 4,385).]

In other words, Mr. Schreiner was a consistent and convinced opponent
of Imperial intervention. But there was a difference between his
motive and that of the Bond leaders. Schreiner desired to prevent
intervention, not because he did not recognise the justice of the
claims of the Uitlanders, but because he believed that the Imperial
Government was devoid of any right to intervene under the Conventions;
while, at the same time, his instinctive sympathy with the Afrikander
nationalists made him blind to the existence of any moral right of
interference that Eng