Here indeed is a very close parallel, but the climax is still to come.  The treaty arrived at was practically an apology on the part of the South African Republic.  Many citizens of the Free State who had joined the northern forces moved over the Vaal after this event.  Those who remained and those who had been previously arrested were brought to trial for high treason.  One man was sentenced to death, but the sentence was mitigated subsequently to a fine; others were fined.  These fines were again still further mitigated at the solicitation of Messrs. Paul Kruger and Steyn, until it came to little more than a ten-pound note apiece.

There we have the story of President Kruger and his friends playing exactly the part Dr. Jameson and the Johannesburg Reformers tried to do.  As Potchefstroom rose under Mr. Kruger against the oligarchical rule of Lydenburg, so Johannesburg was to rise against Pretoria.  The Potchefstroom Republic under Pretorius and Kruger made a raid a la Jameson into the Orange Free State for political purposes, to encourage those who were believed to be anxious to effect a union.  And just as Jameson failed against the Government of Pretoria, so Pretorius failed against the Government of the Orange Free State.  In 1857 it was Paul Kruger not Dr. Jameson who hoisted the white flag.  The Free Staters who had tried to help Kruger’s raid were arrested just as the Johannesburgers were; but although one of them was condemned to death all of them were released, by the intervention of Mr. Kruger himself, on paying a slight fine.

History has repeated itself indeed; but the offence of Dr. Jameson is surely less than that of Mr. Kruger, if we are to pay heed to the records of the Free State Volksraad, wherein it is written that on a certain day the President stated in open Raad that proof had been obtained of a proposed combined attack on the Free State by the Transvaal Boers, led by Pretorius and Kruger on the one side, and the Basutos under Moshesh on the other—­a horrible and unnatural alliance which was not effected only because Moshesh could not trust his professed allies.  The Raad thereupon publicly gave thanks to the Almighty, Who had revealed and frustrated this ‘hideous complot.’

Footnotes for Chapter VI

{24} In the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons the following questions and answers occur, Mr. Blake questioning and Major Heany replying: 

’Having got the message you went off with it and you got in, as we see by the evidence, as quickly as you could, and you just gave the message as accurately as you could to Dr. Jameson?—­I read the message from my note-book absolutely accurately to Dr. Jameson.

’And he did not lose much time in making up his mind?—­No; he went outside his tent.  He was in a bell-tent when I arrived and he went outside and walked up and down for about twenty minutes, and then he came in and announced his determination.’