pounds. The advertisement revenue I soon increased greatly, as I have told, so that the paper was clearing easily one hundred and fifty pounds a week.
I think I have explained sufficiently the financial position. I had 25,000 shares that I could sell very readily if I wanted money, and I had besides 500 deferred shares that ensured me the continuance of my position.
At this time or a little later I sold 5,000 shares to Beit for cash, and 2,000 or 3,000 more to other people who wanted an oar in the boat, and so made myself secure from the monetary point of view for some years to come.
I had only run the Saturday Review a short time when the Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shocked the world and necessitated on my part a prolonged absence from England.
CHAPTER III
The Jameson raid Rhodes and Chamberlain
Scarcely had I got the Saturday Review and taken the first steps to make it successful when the Jameson Raid took place, nominally in obedience to a call for help and protection from the English women and children in Johannesburg. I knew South Africa too well to be deluded for a moment by this shallow pretext. At once I denounced the raid and everyone who defended it. I soon found its defenders were numerous and could make their voices heard in a hundred journals from The Times down.
I saw Beit about it, and Ochs, Woolfie Joel, too, and others, and came very soon upon the proofs that the raid was instigated by Rhodes for selfish interests and would set South Africa in a blaze.
Information reached me that the raiders had been assembled at Pitsani by Rhodes, and everybody in South Africa knew that their real object was not to succor the Outlanders in Johannesburg, but to overthrow the government in Pretoria.
English opinion on the Jameson Raid and its ignoble end was rather undecided till the German Kaiser sent his famous telegram to Krueger, in which he practically told Krueger that if he wanted help he would give it to him. This inconceivably stupid act not only consolidated English opinion in favor of Jameson, but was the very beginning of that dislike of Germany and condemnation of the German Kaiser which later led to the Great War. Even the British Government resented the insult; it mobilized a part of the fleet and, I believe, called ships away from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. It is not too much to say that the English dislike of the Germans dates from that idiotic telegram.
After the Kaiser's telegram, I saw Arthur Walter, but found him a hot partisan of the Jameson Raiders with ears closed to any reason. At first, as I have told, he didn't like Rhodes, but Moberly Bell soon inoculated him with the pan-English patriotic enthusiasm which suited his innate conservatism.
I had thought that the loss of the American colonies would have taught the English people that interference, even with their own kin thousands of miles away, was ill-advised and apt to be dangerous. But in London in 1895 I found nine men out of ten convinced that it was necessary to 'teach the Boers a lesson and put Krueger in his place.' That brutal unreason was so wide spread and intense that I resolved to go to South Africa in order the better to combat this old hereditary madness.
It all reminds me that Englishmen have not grown much in one hundred and fifty years. Didn't Benjamin Franklin write to Lord Kames, somewhere about 1760, that 'the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of British Empire lie in America, and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are nevertheless, broad and strong to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected'? And it was due to Franklin that at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Guadeloupe was restored to France, while Canada remained with England, though popular English opinion at the time wished rather to retain 'the valuable sugar-islands of Guadeloupe' and give Canada to France.
If England had only the sense to profit by Franklin's foresight instead of jeering at him and insulting him, how different the course of world history would have been! As it is, Britain owes her chief possession in North America to his wisdom. In the same way, in 1896,1 found that practically the whole of British opinion, as well in England as in South Africa, was totally and lamentably perverse. I must now return to my own story.
There was no time to lose if I was to do any good, so I took ship at once and was in Cape Town before mid- January, 1896, leaving Runciman in charge of the Saturday Review as my assistant, after having begged him, on any doubtful question, to take counsel with my old friend, the Reverend John Verschoyle.
The first person I wanted to see in South Africa was Jan Hofmeyr, then Rhodes; but curiously enough the day I arrived, Sir James Sivewright came to lunch at the same hotel, and as soon as he heard of me, came up, introduced himself and gave me the benefit of his unrivaled knowledge of South Africa.
When he realized that I wanted the truth and was prepared to accept it, he let himself go freely. He spoke of Hofmeyr with affection and of Rhodes with pity. I soon found him one of the wisest and best informed of counselors. I asked him about Governor General Sir Hercules Robinson, whom I knew and liked. 'Alas!' said Sivewright. 'He's too wedded to Rhodes; but he's honest and capable.'
At length we came to the Jameson Raid and the famous telegram from the women in Johannesburg, asking for Jameson's help. 'That telegram,' said Sivewright, 'was written in Rhodes's office in Cape Town and sent from there to The Times.' I was horrified, but he gave me the proofs of what he alleged.
My first day in Cape Town had been astonishingly fruitful. At once I wrote an article and some notes for the Saturday Review and then, out of my affection for Arthur Walter, I wrote to him, giving chapter and verse for my belief, and begging him to modify the attitude of The Times. A little later Cecil Rhodes told me he knew I was working against him through Walter, and after that I let The Times take care of itself.
After the raid, Rhodes went up to Kimberley and the British element made his railway journey a sort of triumphal progress, but the more thoughtful spirits all condemned him. On his return to Cape Town he prepared to go back to England at once.
I had several interesting talks with him, and because he had been jolted, so to speak, out of his ordinary self-centered optimistic attitude, I came to know him better than ever before. I found he had gone entirely astray.
'What on earth could you hope to win by the raid?' I asked at length.
'I don't admit I had anything to do with it,' Rhodes replied.
'Let us leave that,' I answered, 'but what could Dr. Jim hope to win by it?
Suppose he had got into Johannesburg; next day it would have been surrounded by five thousand Boers and in a week would have had to surrender.'
'In a week a great deal might happen,' said Rhodes sententiously.
'I understand,' I replied. 'Hercules Robinson would probably have gone north and consulted Krueger to play fair, but neither in war nor peace could your raiders have gained anything. It was an idiotic move.'
'And suppose Chamberlain had taken a hand in the game?' Rhodes went on.
'You mean to say?' I cried; he nodded- 'Worse and worse,' I countered; 'that would have meant war, a race war in South Africa with fifty thousand Boer settlers and eighty thousand English loafers; you would have needed one hundred thousand British soldiers.
Rhodes, you could not want that!'
'Krueger would have given in,' he said.
'You know better,' I cried, 'you know Krueger would never give in and his Boers would back him to the last.'
'Evidently you know South Africa better than I do,' was his final fling.
'I am appealing,' I said, 'to Rhodes sober, the Rhodes I knew years ago, who taught me a good deal about South Africa and the Boer stubbornness.'
'Well,' he said smiling, 'the end is not yet; don't condemn me before the end.'
To that I nodded my head.
This talk was only preliminary; I wanted to know Rhodes better: his real view of life and what he wanted to do in it. At length, one evening, I came to an understanding of his peculiar view of the world.
He had already spoken to me of Ruskin, who had influenced him profoundly through a lecture at Oxford; and
