We have seen how a few articles (for which a leading French paper
received £100,000) were instrumental in enabling the Panama Canal Co. to
swindle the French public of forty million pounds sterling, and more
recently, where through Press agency it became feasible to a combination
of Jesuitism and militarism to seduce by far the greater portion of the
noble French nation into frenzied agitation and anti-Semitic excesses,
and load the entire people with almost ineffaceable guilt in the matter
of that unfortunate Dreyfus. In its Press campaign the Afrikaner Bond
employed several leading Colonial organs--the Bloemfontein _Express_,
the Pretoria _Volksstem_, the _Standard and Diggers' News_ of
Johannesburg, and numerous papers of note abroad as well. These were
coached, in the usual masterly manner, sophisticating and perverting
truth. Whenever a lull occurred in treating one or other of the more
salient questions, those South African papers would invariably
contain--especially in their Dutch columns--aspersive articles, coupled
with invective comments to prejudice the Boer mind and to reawaken
anti-English sentiments. It is notable as a proof that the Bond party
lacked all occasions for recriminations, so that those papers had to
resort for material for their vituperation to distorted incidents of
Transvaal history prior to the peace of 1881. There would, for example,
be dished up falsely rendered and dramatically coloured and perverted
selections, such as the treacherous massacre of Retief's party in 1838,
averring that the Zulu king, Dingaan, had been incited thereto by the
British authorities; tragic descriptions of events, coupled with the
massacres by Zulu impis soon after at Weenen and Blaauwkrantz, averred
also to have taken place at the instance of the English Government, and
ever and anon references and full tragic descriptions of the
Slachtersnek execution in 1816, omitting to state that the Boer culprits
were hanged after fair and open trial and conviction by a "Boer" jury