have reached Dr. Jameson in such guise as to induce him to take the step which he had taken.  It was assumed that the telegrams sent from Johannesburg and Capetown to stop him had not reached him, and that Messrs. Heany and Holden had also failed to catch him before he started.  Opinions however were still divided as to whether he had simply lost patience and come in regardless of all consequences, or had been really misled and had dashed in to the assistance of Johannesburg.  The position was at best one of horrible uncertainty, and divided as the Committee were in their opinions as to his motive they could only give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that there was behind his action no personal aim and no deliberate disregard of his undertakings.  In order to realize the perplexity of the position it must be understood that only the few who happened to meet on Sunday and Monday morning knew of the telegrams which had passed during the previous twenty-four hours, many did not know of them until Pretoria prison gave them time to compare notes; to some they may be news even now.  There was no time to argue then!

Knowing the poorness of the equipment of Johannesburg and the unpreparedness of the place and its inhabitants the more logical and cold-blooded course would have been to repudiate Dr. Jameson instantly and to have left him to his fate; but against this was firstly, the fact publicly admitted that he had remained on the border by arrangement with the leaders in order to help them should the necessity arise; next, that if he gave heed to the reports which were being circulated he might have thought that the necessity had arisen; and finally, that the leaders had taken such steps in the smuggling in of arms and the arming of men as would warrant the Boers, and indeed anybody else, in associating them with Dr. Jameson, so that they might confidently expect to be attacked as accomplices before the true facts could become known.  They realized quite well that they had a big responsibility to the unarmed population of Johannesburg, and it was with the object of fulfilling that obligation that they decided to arm as many men as possible and to fortify and defend the place if attacked, but, in view of the impossibility of aggressive measures being successful, to take no initiative against the Boers.  It would in any case have been entirely useless to suggest the repudiation of Dr. Jameson at that moment.  The Johannesburg people would never have listened to such a suggestion, nor could anyone have been found to make it.

In view of the fact that the Reform Committee have been charged with the crime of plunging the country into civil war with a miserable equipment of less than 3,000 rifles, it is only fair to give some heed to the conditions as they were at the time and to consider whether any other course would have been practicable, and if practicable, whether it would have been in the interests of any considerable section of the community.