ABSTRACT
Today relations between the two European peoples in South Africa are thought to be of quite secondary importance everywhere except in South Africa itself. ‘The worst and most dangerous of all the disservices which that party [the liberal] has rendered to our country’, complained Milner at Johannesburg in 1902, ‘is that by their eternal clamour they keep the thoughts of their countrymen with regard to South Africa in one particular rut. Though the imperial factor played no direct part in the shaping of Union none the less English-speaking South Africans continued to repose their ultimate faith upon it. They could, so they thought, in consequence, afford to leave politics to Afrikaners and attend to their financial and commercial enterprises. Afrikaners thought in terms of race and culture, they spoke of heart or soul of Afrikanerdom and they had a belief born of frontier isolation in their destiny and their oneness which explains why this beaten people came into their own.
