It may well be imagined that Mr. Chamberlain and his noble colleagues
had anything but beds of roses whilst pursuing the diplomacy adopted to
checkmate the Bond. They had to gain national support without divulging
their own proceeding, and were at the same time reduced to a situation
which imposed a spartan fortitude in concealing and repressing
involuntary perturbation in the presence of an impending national
crisis, and also the stoical endurance of bitter recriminations on the
part of an opposition comprising a large and honourable but poorly
informed section of the English nation.




BOER LANGUAGE


We come now to the topic of language, which will be found relevant,
showing Hollander and Bond influence in using that also as a hostile
weapon. What the Boers still speak is a vernacular or dialect so far
removed from High Dutch as to be unintelligible to the uninitiated
Hollander. It took its form from the dialects brought to the Cape of
Good Hope by unlettered Dutch colonists and a large admixture of locally
produced idioms, with a slight trace of the structure of the French
language in expressing negations. In the two Republics High Dutch rules
for official purposes, but in common intercourse the vernacular Dutch is
still about the same as it had been a hundred years ago. For an
English-Dutch interpreter the thorough knowledge of the vernacular is
essential. Preachers and teachers have to adapt their speech by
combining High Dutch with the dialect, the one or the other
predominating according to the capacity of the hearers. Hollanders