the unconscious undercurrent that flowed in Dutch minds in the years before it The famous chief writes freely of colonial 'treason' and 'traitors.' He does not mean the Cape rebels who joined the Boers; nor does he mean the 'tame Boers,' in army slang, who joined the British. He means colonists who stood to their allegiance and fought He means all colonial-born men, whether Dutch or English by extraction, who bore arms against the Republics. To De Wet these are traitors, against whom he cannot enough express his honest indignation. Traitors to what allegiance? Why, for bold spirits like De Wet, that pan-South African Republic embracing the Colonies, that dream which, we are told, would have died out if we had but waited, was already no dream, but a living reality imposing an allegiance of its own and abrogating all others! 'But will the dream die out now?' So some objector may ask—someone who takes a faint-hearted view of the war, and a still more faint-hearted view of the peace. There is a sense in which I, for one, hope that dream will never die out, but that little by little, under the anodyne spell of free self-government, the sturdy souls who cherish it will come to feel that the dream is realized, as nearly as it could ever be outside dreamland, in a South Africa which is united, is a 'crowned Republic,' and is as much theirs as ours.
That lies on the knees of the gods. What is certain is that when Milner came on the scene the two wrestling ideals had reached deadlock. The time was past for palliatives such as the Smutses and Reitzes would gladly have consented to—removal of the corruptions and stupid scandals of Government without real change of the bases of power. So far had things drifted that any sincere reform must involve an abdication of the Boer Government and look like an abdication of the Boer people. This was as clear to the Boers as to the rest of us; and what Milner found was that South Africa contained no inner force capable of making them consent to it. He inferred that the force must be
