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 embroiled elsewhere.  It was also thought of importance that the Transvaal should first realize the auriferous “underground rights” situated around the Johannesburg mines, which Government asset was expected to net at least fifty million pounds sterling.  The sales had already been advertised, and were in preparation when the outbreak of the war intervened.  Upon the word “ready,” flashed from Bloemfontein, followed at once the fateful Pretoria ultimatum.  The proceeds of those underground rights must now come in afterwards to defray the war bill.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 11:  President Krueger’s reference to that factory is well known, styling it as one of the corner-stones of Boer independence.]

THE BOERS’ NATIVE POLICY

Boer views regarding coloured peoples are those retained from Dutch practices of a hundred and more years ago, when the Cape of Good Hope still belonged to that nation.  Servitude, if not absolute slavery, was then generally recognised as the proper status for coloured aborigines, and that principle of differentiation continues to be upheld and applied in a modified form, it must be admitted, in all the Colonial possessions of Holland.  The authority for this stand is sought from ancient biblical history, where the descendants of Ham appear marked out for servitude, and from that basis it is interpreted that people so marked are not designed for tuition or evangelization until after they have been subjugated.  According to such a doctrine the injunction to preach the Gospel to every creature would be limited to civilized whites, and might only be extended to such coloured peoples who have been fitted, as is said, for the reception of the Christian faith by being placed under the subserviency of whites, as their sponsors if not their actual masters, and requiring mundane tuition and education as essential bases to precede conversion.