As for the Uitlanders and their grievances, I would not ride a yard or fire a shot to right all the grievances that were ever invented.  The mass of the Uitlanders (i.e., the miners and working-men of the Rand) had no grievances.  I know what I am talking about, for I have lived and worked among them.  I have seen English newspapers passed from one to another, and roars of laughter roused by the Times telegrams about these precious grievances.  We used to read the London papers to find out what our grievances were; and very frequently they would be due to causes of which we had never even heard.  I never met one miner or working-man who would have walked a mile to pick the vote up off the road, and I have known and talked with scores and hundreds.  And no man who knows the Rand will deny the truth of what I tell you.

No; but the Uitlanders the world has heard of were not these, but the Stock Exchange operators, manipulators of the money market, company floaters and gamblers generally, a large percentage of them Jews.  They voiced Johannesburg, had the press in their hands, worked the wires, and controlled and arranged what sort of information should reach England.  As for the grievances, they were a most useful invention, and have had a hand in the making of many fortunes.  It was by these that a feeling of insecurity was introduced into the market which would otherwise have remained always steady; it was by these that the necessary and periodic slump was brought about.  When the proper time came, “grievances,” such as would arrest England’s attention and catch the ear of the people, were deliberately invented; stories again were deliberately invented of the excitement, panic, and incipient revolution of Johannesburg, and by these means was introduced that feeling of insecurity I have spoken of, which was necessary to lower prices.

Not a finger would I raise for these fellows.  And another war-cry which I profoundly disbelieve in, and which will probably turn out in the long run to be a hoax, is the “Dutch South Africa” cry.  How any one who knows his South Africa, who knows the isolation of life among the farmers, and the utter stagnation of all ideas that exists among the people, can credit the Boers with vaulting ambitions of this sort, is always a surprise to me.  I fancy such theories are mostly manufactured for the English market.  Naturally I form my opinion more or less from the men in our corps who seem best worth attending to.  They, most of them, have an intimate knowledge of the Colony and of one or both of the Republics, and I do not find that they take the “Great Dutch Conspiracy” at all seriously.  Some people maintain that, though perhaps the Boer farmers themselves were not in it, yet their leaders were.  But the farmers form the vast majority of the Boers.  They are an independent and stiff-necked type; and it is as absurd to suppose that their leaders could pledge them to such vast and visionary schemes as it is to suppose that such schemes could have the slightest interest for them.  As a matter of fact, what has given old Kruger his long ascendency is the way in which he shares and embodies the one or two simple, dogged ideas of the mass of the Burghers.  “God bless the Boers and damn the British” are two of the chief of these, but they only apply them within their own borders.