Growing Political Consciousness An Ideal Commonwealth

In 1895 James Bryce, the renowned British constitutional scholar who also served as British ambassador to Washington, gave the Free State a glowing endorsement. Ignoring the exclusion of all but white males according to the yardstick of the time, he declared: ‘In the Orange Free State I discovered, in 1895, the kind of commonwealth which the fond fancy of the philosophers of the last century painted. It is an ideal commonwealth’ that came closest to the philosophical ideal ‘of free and independent persons uniting in an absolutely new social compact for mutual help and defence, and thereby creating a government whose authority has had and can have no origin save in the consent of the governed.’