ing, sprang up the city of Johannesburg with its motley and cosmopolitan population, its speculators, company promoters, traders, miners, and labouring men.

To the Transvaal, at any rate in the beginning, the arrival of these wealth-engendering hordes was what the fall of copious rain is to the sun-parched veld. By this time the country was once more almost bankrupt, but now, as though by the waving of a magician's wand, money began to flow into its coffers. One of the characteristics of the Boer is his hatred of taxation; one of his notions of terrestrial bliss is to live in a land where the necessary expenses of administration are paid by somebody else, an advantage, I understand, that among all the civilised nations of the earth is enjoyed alone by the inhabitants of the Principality of Monaco. It is not usual, either in the instance of communities or individuals, that such ideals should be absolutely attained. Yet to the fortunate possessors of the South African Republic this happened. For quite a long period they lived at ease in their dorps. and on their farms, while the dwellers at Johannesburg, delving like gnomes in the reefs of the Rand, provided them with magnificent and never-failing supplies of cash. Then questions began to arise, as they will do in this imperfect sphere. The Uitlanders, as the strangers were called, remembering the terms of the Conventions, drawn under a very different condition of affairs but still binding, hinted at a wish for burgher rights.

The Boers, who if they liked their money objected to the money-makers, instantly took alarm. If the vote were given to the Uitlanders it was obvious that very soon they would outnumber the original electors. Then in a natural, but to them terrifying, sequence would come a redistribution of the burdens of taxation, the abolition of monopolies, the punishment of corruption, the just treatment of the native races, the absolute purity of the courts, and all the other things and institutions, in their eyes abominable, which mark the advent of Anglo-Saxon rule. Behind these also loomed another danger, that of the ultimate reappearance of the English flag. So legislation was resorted to, and bit by bit the Uitlanders were stripped of the rights inherent to their position as "inhabitants of the Transvaal territory," till at last none were left to them at all. Indeed Press laws were passed and other enactments controlling the privilege of free speech and public meetings. Of course had the British Government put down its foot firmly and at once at the first symptom of a desire on the part of the Boers to whittle away such advantages as the Conventions secured to our fellow-subjects, the present sad situation need never have arisen. But British Governments are seldom fond of doing things at the right time, more especially if the issue is not sufficiently distinct to be appreciated by the masses of the electorate. Therefore matters were allowed to drift, and they drifted

into that outrageous fiasco, the Jameson Raid of 1895.

Into the history of that event I do not propose to enter; it is sufficiently well known. Suffice it to say in this brief summary, that it was the result of a compact under which Dr. Jameson was to come to Johannesburg with a large armed force of Rhodesian police, with the view of assisting the Uitlanders to obtain by arms what was denied to their petitions.

The agreement is undoubted and admitted, but all the rest is chaos. Failure in a hundred shapes dogged the steps of these ineffective conspirators. Dr. Jameson, with 500 men instead of 1200, took the bit between his teeth and started at the wrong time. The Uitlanders did not sally forth to meet him, the wires were not cut, the railway line was not destroyed, the Boers were warned, and assembled in great numbers. Dr. Jameson, who apparently lost his way on the veld, was entrapped into a bad position, where, after a space of somewhat feeble combat, he and his whole force surrendered, their lives being guaranteed to them. The despatchbox of the raiders, with the ciphers and sundry incriminating documents, was allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy, and, on their own ammunitionwaggons, the personnel of the Raid performed the journey to that city of Pretoria, which when reinforced by the Uitlanders they were to have entered in triumph. Thence they were in due course despatched to London for trial. The members of the Reform

Committee were also seized and tried at Pretoria, several of them being condemned to death, a sentence which was not executed; the whole story, coming to its end to an accompaniment of the clash not of swords, but of gold; the fines inflicted upon the conspirators by the Transvaal Government amounting to a total of many tens of thousands of pounds.

Such, except for mutual recriminations which still continue, was the end of Johannesburg's armed attempt to throw off the yoke of the Boer, and of the efforts of the ruling powers of Rhodesia to assist them in the task. Of course the upshot was that the poor Uitlanders fell into a still deeper pit of oppression and despair. Lord Rosmead, then Sir Hercules Robinson, never a proconsul remarkable for an iron will, it is true visited the Transvaal in a great flurry, and assured, or caused Sir Sidney Shippard and the British agent, a gentleman of the somewhat alien-sounding name of Sir Jacobus de Wet, in substance to assure the Uitlanders that if only they would disarm probably their wrongs must shortly be righted by a beneficent Boer president, assisted to the task by a Raad full of forgiveness and charity. Moreover, Sir Jacobus de Wet told them explicitly that the lives of Jameson and his men depended upon their laying down such weapons as they possessed, although of course those lives were already guaranteed by the terms of the surrender.

But this raid had wider issues of an imperial nature. Thus it provoked the famous telegram from the

i

Emperor William II., which at one time threatened to bring about a war between Great Britain and Germany. Also, so far as these South African troubles were concerned, it put our country hopelessly in the wrong in the eyes of the civilised world, whom it proved difficult to persuade, although in fact this was the case, that such strange and tortuous developments of political and martial activity were purely local in their origin. Again it armed the Boer with a sword of wondrous power. If Providence had sent all the German legions to his aid it could scarcely have served him better. Now indeed he was able to point to his land violated by the foot of the invader, and to talk of raids as though such a wicked word had never defiled the innocence of his ears; as though in truth he had never heard of the plains of Stellaland, and of a certain expedition sent by the British Government under the command of Sir Charles Warren to preserve those territories to the peaceful enjoyment of their owners; nor of that stretch of country which once belonged to the Zulus, but is now called the New Republic; nor of the trek into Rhodesia that was damped"; nor of the extension of authority over Swaziland in defiance of the provisions of the Convention, and of other kindred matters.

Also it enabled him to claim "moral and intellectual damages" to a considerable amount, although, so far as the public is aware, these have never been satisfied, and indeed caused Pharaoh to harden his