 However, while Kruger retained a majority and remained in power, there was little chance of the necessary rapprochement emerging that would lead to participation in an economic, much less political union.Smuts was in full agreement with Rhodes's public platform of South African unity, sentiments which the young Smuts had begun to advocate in his 1888 Victoria College address and in his 1891 Ebden essay.Smuts saw union as being self-evidently beneficial, the only possible point of contention being whether it would be a union dominated by Britain or one dominated by the Afrikaners.