ing. Downing Street always shook its head, having learnt something in South Africa from past blunders. It always told the sounders that it could not interfere in the internal affairs of the Transvaal on their behalf, and that if they accordingly took

MR. LIONEL PHILLIPS.

From a Photograph by DUFFUS BROS., Johannesburg.

steps to win their rights for themselves, Great Britain could only interfere by way of keeping the peace in South Africa, and not at a time or in a way which could be construed as assisting them to break it. To the leaders thus repulsed, and

to Rhodes and Jameson, the machinery of the British South Africa Company, which had already served once to make short work of international red tape in the case of the Portuguese in East Africa, offered an excellent means of doing for Great Britain what Great Britain declined to do for herself. From nowhere could external support, moral or actual, be better rendered than from the Company's new territory touching the western border. The moment uproar began, and life and property were in danger, a plausible excuse would be created for the interposition of any organized British force which was within two days of striking distance. The pretext for its action would be the jeopardy of British lives, property and interests, the interregnum in the country, the necessity for the preservation of order, and an emergency of a kind to justify acting first and asking leave afterwards. The exact method and moment of such action were never clearly fixed, but the idea was that Jameson would be there, and that Jameson was Jameson, and that a diversion of some kind, with a vague background of support from the Company's other forces farther north, might at least serve to secure to the revolutionary camarilla a pause and a breathing space before the burghers closed in upon them/ That breathing space meant everything. Civil war would be imminent, and for that very reason the hand of the British Government, it was calculated, would be forced. Intervene they must to part the combatants, and to avert chaos. The moment these events took place South Africa would be plunged from end to end into a maelstrom of conflicting sympathies, and much would turn on the attitude of the Cape Government. Here came in Mr. Rhodes' part. Sticking like glue to his Premiership he was to fling all his official and unofficial advantages into the scale. His personality was to make the Government weather the storm long enough for him to advise the High Commissioner, who is also the Governor of the Cape, to proceed at once to the Transvaal as mediator, accompanied by Mr. Rhodes himself. The rest of the programme is easily imagined. Thus the man who was at once

Premier of the Cape, and uncrowned king of John Bull's modern "John Company," besides being head of some great capitalist amalgamations, proposed to add the rôles of arming a revolution, of succouring it with troops from the border, of “facing the music" when the crash came, and governing the extraordinary situation which would ensue as the one man who could mediate between Dutch and English Cape Colony, and between England and the Transvaal. Upon this hazard he staked the most brilliant and promising career boasted by any contemporary politician in the British Empire.

On the obvious weaknesses of this amazing scheme, considered simply on a balance of probability, it is unnecessary to dilate here. Events have done that. The question which forces itself upon us is; how on earth could a man of the caution, the patience, and the foresight of Cecil Rhodes have made up his mind to shut his eyes to the present Premier is a simple one. the plot was brewing Mr. Rhodes was known nervous sequela of influenza. Sir Gordon Sprigg declares. "Whatever part he took in the thing was simply due to the influenza." A solution which has all the charm of simplicity.

them? The answer of All those months when miserable with the well"He was not himself,"

A

Chapter IV

THE PLOT THICKENS

S the Uitlander demands made themselves more and more vocal at the time of the Drifts incident, the Government made it clear that it was providing itself with the last argument of kings. For weeks it brought offensive arms to bear on Johannesburg. The Uitlander saw contracts entered into for building, with his money, forts on the latest pattern of scientific destructiveness, which could be aimed only at himself: a fort at Pretoria at £25,000, and site chosen for another openly commanding Johannesburg. A Mr. Van Zwieten, one of Oom Paul's Hollanders, was sent to Europe, as it was understood, with credentials to the military authorities of Germany, and instructions to engage expert tuition for the shooting of Uitlanders on the latest European methods. While the conspirators were smuggling up Maxims in oil tanks, the Government was laying in two for every one of theirs by Delagoa Bay. Orders for heavy artillery and quickfiring guns were placed with the German firm, Krupp, and a battery of quick-firers was established on the Hospital Hill, directly overlooking the streets of Johannesburg. Ever since the raid these aggressive military preparations have been spoken of as a painful necessity to be numbered among its consequences, but in strict chronology it was the Government which armed itself first, while the Uitlanders, as a body, were still on constitutional lines, and when the Government, by its own account, had not the slightest knowledge of the plot in which a few of them afterwards proved to have been engaged. It became clear to the leaders that if Pretoria was to be taken by surprise, it must be taken quickly.

At the same time events were forcing on that transfer of the Protectorate which was destined to put the British South Africa Company in charge of the western border. In its 1895 Session the Cape Parliament had closed a bargain with the Imperial Government for the southern part of Bechuanalandthe Crown Colony. The reversion of the northern part of Bechuanaland, the Protectorate, had long been promised to the great Company which to north of it already spread away across the Zambesi to Lake Tanganyika, and which was pushing on the railway which could alone make Bechuanaland productive. The claims of certain native chiefs, Khama and others, had at the same time to be safeguarded. Mr. Chamberlain settled with them in September and October, and on 7th November the rest of the Protectorate was transferred to the Company.1 Already in October the Company had come to terms with the two smaller chiefs, Montsioa and Ikanning, and had accordingly got its administration of their territory proclaimed (18th October). These two petty chiefs owned a part of Bechuanaland, close to the railway extension on the one hand, and on the other in contact with the Transvaal border. It was here that the conspirators chose the swooping point for the raid; and everything fitted in so conveniently that, when the swoop came, and before the Imperial Government had spoken, no wonder that many jumped to the conclusion that the British Government was a party to the preparations. The truth about this appears to be quite simple. To understand it the first thing is to put out of one's mind what actually did happen and to imagine what observant people fully expected to see happen at the time of the events already described. In handing over the territory the Imperial Government disbanded the troops; but had it retained them, and if the High Commissioner had held them in readiness to intervene in case of a kind of Alex andria riot suddenly supervening in Johannesburg, he would only have been doing exactly what his predecessor did at the

1 The transference was not completed when the crisis came, and has not been carried out now.