A week later (August 11th), President Krüger received a telegram[125] in which fifty Afrikander members of the Cape Parliament advanced the same argument. The acceptance of the Joint Commission, they pointed out, would provide a way out of a crisis "which might prove fatal to the best interests, not only of our Transvaal and Free State brethren, but also of the Afrikander party." They, therefore, begged his Honour to "lay their words privately" before the Executive and the Volksraad. [Footnote 125: Secured by the Intelligence Department.] [Sidenote: Krüger resolved on war.] But President Krüger, like Lord Milner, had his eyes fixed upon the object. He looked beyond the Afrikander leaders to the rank and file of the Dutch population in the British colonies, with whom he had been in direct communication through his agents for many months past.[126] He knew that any such inquiry as Mr. Chamberlain proposed would expose the flagrant insincerity of the Franchise Bill. On August 2nd he had telegraphed to President Steyn that compliance with the Joint Commission was "tantamount to the destruction of the independence of the Republic."[127] To the Dutch Consul-General[128] he was perfectly frank: "Defeats such as the English had suffered in the war for freedom, and later under Jameson, had never been suffered by the Boers." His burghers were ready to "go on the _battue_ of Englishmen," when he gave the word.[129] [Footnote 126: It was known to the Intelligence Department that Krüger's secret agents had been in the Cape Colony for two years before the outbreak of war, and that they had distributed arms in certain districts of the Colony.] [Footnote 127: Secured by the Intelligence Department.] [Footnote 128: Cd. 547.] [Footnote 129: The expression "Ons wil nou Engelse schiet" was actually used. See Thomas's _Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed_, p. 110.] [Sidenote: Fischer ceases to "mediate".]