we were going to do. We believed, or I believed, that my first telegram had already reached him, telling him that we disavowed the raid, and had ordered Jameson to return. Harris says that when we got that second telegram we must have known that Krueger hadn't got my first telegram; and Harris is right. I should have drawn that inference; I remember it struck me at the time as curious that Krueger should merely repeat the news. Then came Krueger's third telegram, and of course Harris insists again it must have made me see that Krueger had not received my first telegram. We answered it, and now Harris says that both these telegrams of mine, official telegrams, must have been sent as ordinary telegrams, for Krueger didn't get even the first of them in the day; Krueger got no word from us till the Monday afternoon, Harris asserts.'
'I can only tell Mr. Harris,' said Bower, 'that the whole place was in a state of the intensest excitement. I went twice or three times to Rhodes and couldn't see him; visitors called at every moment, Hofmeyr and others, who had to be seen: everyone was running about.'
'All the more reason,' I said, 'for sending such important telegrams on the special official forms.
'My God!' said Robinson, putting his hands to his head. 'My God! That's what Krueger's cold reception of me meant.'
There could be no doubt about the matter. Hercules Robinson was blameless in the affair. He had been kept out of it. Rhodes had found a surer tool in the Imperial Secretary, Sir Graham Bower.
I rubbed the point in decisively.
'Your message,' I said, 'the telegram of the High Commissioner, the most important telegram ever sent from this office, went as an ordinary telegram, and instead of taking precedence, followed some hundreds of others in ordinary sequence to Pretoria; and Krueger sat in council all day, sending message after message to you, and getting no reply, but getting wire after wire from country districts to the effect that Jameson was pushing on towards his capital as hard as he could. Can you expect Krueger to trust the English after this? All that day, all that night, the old man waited, and half the next day before you gave him the chance to act.'
'Good God!' said Robinson.
'You don't want me any more, Sir?' asked Graham Bower, pointedly, and left the room.
'What's to be done now?' cried Hercules Robinson, falling into his seat.
'What's to be done? But how did you know all this? How have you in a few days found out more than I knew, I with such power and experience, and living at the center?'
A little later I went up to Johannesburg, and while there was asked to go and see the President by Chief Justice Kotze of the High Court. I went across one day to Pretoria. It is like a town set in a saucer with low hills ringing it round; a town of squat Dutch houses set amid trees and little noisy rivulets of water running down the sides of the streets-everywhere the chatter of children and childish games, and quiet home life. And in the strange little provincial town, two or three magnificent public buildings that represent fairly enough the obstinate patriotism of the Boer.
I was invited to call upon the President at six o'clock in the morning, but I declared that if I got up at that hour I should be at my worst, and I wanted to be at my best. When the President heard that I never got up before the day was well aired, he invited me to come and have coffee with him, and so I called upon him in the early afternoon, called with Chief Justice Kotze, who was kind enough to offer to act as interpreter. The house was an ordinary Boer house, the reception-room an ordinary Boer parlor with wax flowers, colored worsted mats and a huge Bible as its chief ornaments, unless I include the enormous spittoon, which was used at every moment by the master. I hardly dare to describe the coffee. For providing this coffee Krueger got eight hundred a year besides his salary of eight thousand pounds, and I should think that for eight pounds he could make enough of it to float a battleship. It was the vilest liquid I had ever attempted to drink; a very disagreeable decoction of Gregory powder in half-warm milk. I took one sip and left it at that.
I told about the interview in its main lines in the Saturday Review at that time, and gave the best portrait I could of the village Cromwell called Paul Krueger. Every one is familiar with his likeness to a great gorilla, his porky baboon face, and small piggy grey eyes, but no portrait could give an impression of the massive strength, the power, and restrained passion of the man. He must have been fifty-four inches round the chest, and when seated looked like a Hercules. The worst fault in his gigantic figure was the shortness of his legs. Strange to say, he is one of the few men who has grown greater in my memory, and this in spite of all the rumblings and failings of his later years. Had he been trained, had he had any education or reading, Paul Krueger would have been one of the greatest of men. As it was, he was one of the most remarkable.
Krueger was suspicious, as the ignorant always are, self-centered like most strong-willed, successful men, but not devoid of heart and conscience. His treatment of the Outlanders in Johannesburg was simply insane. Some eighty thousand of them had made Johannesburg the greatest gold-mining industry in the world; they paid more than nine-tenths of the state taxes.
Instead of getting just enough to live on-a few hundreds a year-from his twenty thousand Boer burghers, Krueger was now a rich man. The Outlanders had turned the Transvaal from a bankrupt state into the wealthiest in South Africa, with a revenue of three millions sterling a year: yet in 1894 he had made it impossible for them to obtain a vote in a country to which they contributed practically the whole revenue. They had no control even over the affairs of the city they had founded and built up.
Krueger still treated Johannesburg as a mining camp under his own mining commissioner.
Dutch was taught in the schools, and not English. Though denied all rights of citizenship and treated as aliens, the Outlanders were nevertheless liable to be impressed for service in native wars. Krueger's iniquities were surely unparalleled. He had given foreigners a concession for the manufacture of dynamite, which was imported into the country by monopolists, and sold at such a price to the mines that it practically imposed a tax of half a million pounds a year on the industry. Another lot of adventurers got the concession for carrying coal along the Rand, which they did at the highest possible rate; another group owned a liquor concession which corrupted the natives.
The curious thing was that Krueger's treatment of the Outlanders was no worse than his treatment of the Boers in the Cape. He wouldn't allow the Transvaal to enter the Customs Union; and pigs, cattle, and coal from the Cape could be imported only on payment of fantastic duties. The spirit of his policy was shown in one act. When the Transvaal railway management proposed to put up the rate from the Vaal above six-pence a ton in order to kill the Cape traffic, Krueger asked them to make it a shilling; and when the traders left the railway at the Free State border and carried their goods over the short stretch to Johannesburg in bullock-wagons, Krueger proclaimed that the Vaal Drifts, which they had to cross, would be closed to them.
This last piece of despotism brought a new force into the field. In 1895 Joseph Chamberlain had made himself the Minister of the Colonies; and although he had no liking for Rhodes, still, when Rhodes appealed to him, he took his view and described President Krueger's act about the Drifts as one 'almost of hostility,' and declared his willingness to back up his protest by force.
Reluctantly, Krueger saw he had gone too far and threw open the Drifts.
Then the raid took place, which blotted out even the memory of most of the President's stupidities and threw the onus of flagrant wrong doing upon Rhodes.
Early in the interview Krueger asked me point blank whether I believed, like Hercules Robinson, that Chamberlain didn't know about the raid. I said, 'I couldn't tell: there was no proof. I felt certain the Cabinet didn't know it, and could hardly believe that Mr. Chamberlain would act as dictator in such a matter.'
'The Cabinet didn't know of it?' questioned Krueger. 'You are sure?' 'As sure as I can be of such a thing,' I replied.
In the back of my mind was the feeling that Chamberlain must have known all about it, may have talked even to Mr. Balfour about it, but I wanted to say rather less than more of what I believed out of patriotic feeling, and so I maintained the possibility of Chamberlain's innocence. Krueger turned on me sharply.
'You know that Rhodes planned it, paid for it, directed it?' he barked.
'Surely,' I replied. 'He confessed as much in Cape Town to Jan Hofmeyr, and I have wired that home to my paper.'
'So,' he cried, 'you admit that Rhodes was a scoundrel?' 'Worse,' I replied quietly, 'a blundering idiot, to think that five hundred men could beat the Boers.'
The great burly man sprang erect, while his little grey eyes snapped in the fat pork face. He looked like a maddened baboon.
'Four hundred boys,' he shouted. 'Do you know what I would have done with them?'
