It is useless to speculate as to what would have happened had Dr. Jameson reached Johannesburg.  The prestige of success might have enabled him, as it has enabled many others, to achieve the apparently impossible and compel the acceptance of terms which would have insured a lasting peace; but as Johannesburg had neither arms nor ammunition, especially the latter, commensurate with the requirements of anything like severe fighting, even for a single day, and as the invading force had not more than enough for its own requirements, it is difficult to conceive that anything but disaster could have followed.

Throughout the troubles which followed the invasion it was not the personal suffering or loss which fell to the lot of the Johannesburg people that touched them so nearly as the taunts which were unjustly levelled at them for not rendering assistance to Dr. Jameson.  The terms, ‘cowards,’ ‘poltroons,’ and ‘traitors,’ and the name of ‘Judasburg,’ absolutely undeserved as they were known to be, rankled in the hearts of all, and it was only by the exercise of much self-denial and restraint that it was possible for men to remain silent during the period preceding Dr. Jameson’s trial.  Extremely bitter feeling was roused by the tacit approval given to these censures by the officers of the invading force, for their continued silence was naturally construed to be tacit approval.  ‘Not once,’ said one of the Reformers, ’has a single member of Dr. Jameson’s party come forward and stated that the imputations on the Reformers were undeserved; yet we gave them the benefit of every doubt, and tried throughout to screen them, whilst all the time the Doctor and at least three of his companions knew that they had started to “make their own flotation.”  That is not cricket.’

It has been urged on behalf of Dr. Jameson that he could not have been asked to state prior to his trial that he never expected or arranged for help from Johannesburg—­that his case was already a sufficiently difficult one without embarrassing it with other people’s affairs.  Yet it was noted in Johannesburg that, when a report was circulated to the effect that he had started the invasion on the instructions of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, he and another officer of his force wrote jointly to the English papers to say that there was no truth whatever in the statement.  The consequences of taking upon himself the responsibility for initiative in this way, while he had yet to undergo his trial, were far more serious than would have followed a simple statement to the effect that injustice was being done to the Rand community in the charges of cowardice laid against it.  It was felt then, and the feeling has not in any way abated, that Dr. Jameson regarded the fate and interests of the people of Johannesburg with indifference, looking upon them merely as pawns in a game that he was playing.  It was only Mr. Rhodes who took an opportunity to say that ’the Johannesburg people are not cowards; they were rushed.’