which the people had learnt to consider legitimate and in fact
incumbent as a duty to themselves and descendants.

The means employed in that conspiracy were a subtle, so to say, occult
propaganda to seduce a simple people to false convictions, to induce the
creation of gigantic armaments, a secret service employing at a vast
cost journalism, emissaries, and agencies, to gain partisans and allies
outside South Africa, the Transvaal mint to coin the sinews of war from
the appropriation of the mines and their output, the dynamite factory
(that Bond corner-stone for manufacturing ammunition[11]), a system of
immigration from Holland towards supplanting the English factor and to
introduce auxiliaries. Other such means were: laws for admitting
auxiliaries to immediate full burgher rights and privilege to carry
arms, from which Uitlanders were rigorously excluded, the rabid campaign
proscribing the English language and fostering High Dutch instead (which
was much less understood by the entire Boer people, and much harder for
them to learn than English). To the above list of devices came the
exhaustive efforts to obtain an independent seaport for the Transvaal,
first at St. Lucia Bay, then at Delagoa Bay (ostensibly with a German
syndicate, and since by subsidizing Portugal or suborning Portuguese
notables and officials).

The climax of duplicity is reached when it is averred that the pursuit
of such an organized programme during the past twenty years and more had
meant peace only, never a thought of conquest, as Ambassador Leyds so
innocently declared after failing to gain abroad the hoped-for support
for the monstrous Bond enormity.

The Afrikaner Bond leaders would have preferred the war to have been
deferred a little longer--preferably to a moment when England might be