In The Very Nature Of Things A Huge Conspiracy Of This Sort To
Substitute Dutch For British Rule In South Africa Is Not A Matter
Which Can Be Easily And Definitely Proved.
Such questions are not
discussed in public documents, and men are sounded before being
taken into the confidence of the conspirators.
But there is plenty
of evidence of the individual ambition of prominent and
representative men in this direction, and it is hard to believe
that what many wanted individually was not striven for
collectively, especially when we see how the course of events did
actually work towards the end which they indicated. Mr. J.P.
FitzPatrick, in 'The Transvaal from Within' - a book to which all
subsequent writers upon the subject must acknowledge their
obligations - narrates how in 1896 he was approached by Mr. D.P.
Graaff, formerly a member of the Cape Legislative Council and a
very prominent Afrikander Bondsman, with the proposition that Great
Britain should be pushed out of South Africa. The same politician
made the same proposal to Mr. Beit. Compare with this the following
statement of Mr. Theodore Schreiner, the brother of the Prime
Minister of the Cape:
'I met Mr. Reitz, then a judge of the Orange Free State, in
Bloemfontein between seventeen and eighteen years ago, shortly
after the retrocession of the Transvaal, and when he was busy
establishing the Afrikander Bond. It must be patent to every one
that at that time, at all events, England and its Government had no
intention of taking away the independence of the Transvaal, for she
had just "magnanimously" granted the same; no intention of making
war on the republics, for she had just made peace; no intention to
seize the Rand gold fields, for they were not yet discovered.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 77 of 842
Words from 20558 to 20854
of 225456
