By bringing the Botha-Smuts ministry to power in 1907, the ‘Vereeniging Het Volk’ (the ‘People's Union’) restored supremacy in the Transvaal to the Boers, less than five years after a war fought with the avowed object of wresting that supremacy from them. One might argue that, given the grant of self-government, this achievement owed less to the organizing techniques of Het Volk as a party, than to the numerical strength and the cohesion of the Boers as a community; but even so, the importance of Het Volk would be established as the expression, at the level of a political party, of these social facts. Coming into existence alongside other parties, before the introduction of self-government, Het Volk helped ensure that under the new constitution a fully fledged party system would function from the beginning.