Maybe this and similar earnests evinced during that noble Queen’s reign, among which the shelter afforded to the Jewish people, will come into remembrance in mitigation of visitations deserved by the nation for its previous complicity in the hideous traffic in African souls of men.

It throws a light upon the credulity and simplicity of the bulk of the poor deluded peasant Boers when, in the face of most genial rule and almost an excess of liberty and privileges, Bond artifice could succeed in conjuring up contrary notions, and to poison them into the monstrous belief that they, the Boers, were an oppressed people, whose downfall was designed by rapacious England, and that no other remedy existed for preserving independence, religion and homes than to expel that wicked English people from African soil.  This is, then, what Bond artifice effected in the absence of actual cause and in order to dissimulate its own nefarious objects.  It was the work of twenty years’ sedulously applied deception and calumnious machinations.

The Hollander coterie has at last succeeded in its ardently desired purpose of pitting the Boer nation against England, and to bring about the present war.  What is even more astounding is the success of those villainous artificers upon intelligent partisans of the Boer cause outside of Africa and in England even.

OCCULT OPERATIONS AND AGENCIES

Will it be considered the mere fancy of enthusiasts, which admits the thought of occult forces of a sinister kind set in array to overturn beneficent dispensations, that the evil one, the father of lies, has been active in all this marring of peace?  Had that personage or evil principle, if this term is more acceptable, not scored with his malignant skill of deception 6,000 years ago, and been walking up and down his domain ever since, intent upon undoing redemptive provisions and counteracting all endeavours to ameliorate the miseries of humanity?  His malice would seem discernible against the Boer nation, the people who continued in the simple faith which had been kept by their ancestors despite the persecutions heaped upon them in France and by the oppressor of Holland; he must have viewed with growing rage the designs of a gracious Providence surrounding that very people with the blessings of security and peace and accumulations of unparalleled riches, all construable as in compensation for the sacrifices so willingly submitted to by their forefathers and for their own fidelity to the faith.  Would he tamely brook that—­and not bend on all his artifices to reverse those provisions and to divert those rich dispensations in favour of his own devotees instead, or else rather cause them to be devoured by wasting war?  He has so far succeeded in instigating the Boer nation to acts which involve the forfeiture of their special heirlooms.  He would also thwart the programme of the world’s nations for the civilization of Central Africa, and would gratify his malice against the people to whom is largely attributable the spread of governmental principles of equity and liberty.  He would seek to stamp with failure those hitherto successful and self-rewarding methods, and so strike an effective blow against their further adoption as being goody-goody, weak and inefficient.