The Reform prisoners, who, animated by a desire not to give any of their comrades away, had for a period of close upon four months borne all the abuse which could be heaped upon them, and had abstained from making any defence in public, or any of those revelations such as have since been made through the exertion of the Transvaal authorities, the Select Committee of the Cape House of Assembly, and the Bow Street officers, found to their inexpressible disgust that the efforts which they had made were rendered futile by the capture of these documents; and they were highly incensed at the action of one of the very men whose lives they believed they had saved by surrendering on January 7.  The affidavit was looked upon as unpardonable, and the unnecessary statement regarding the genuineness of the signatures was interpreted in a very unpleasant sense.

Consultations now took place between Mr. Advocate Wessels and Mr. Richard Solomon, Q.C., of Kimberley, who had also been retained on behalf of the accused; and endeavours were made to obtain from the State Attorney details of the evidence which it was proposed to bring, but with only partial success.  From the facts already known to them it was clear that the Government were determined to stretch every point in law to their own advantage and to indulge in few scruples as to the means to be employed to secure a conviction.  The Judge, it was known, had been specially imported for this trial, and provisionally appointed to a seat on the Bench.  As the confirmation of his appointment was to take place when the Volksraad should meet, or at any rate at some period subsequent to the trial, it was not unnatural to regard his as a case in which a judge was appointed on approval, the appointment to be either confirmed or cancelled according to the satisfaction which he should give.

Appeal to the full bench of the High Court had already been proved to be entirely useless; since the only judges to whom appeal could be made were those who had in the earlier stages associated themselves with the Government against the Reform Committee, and later on in their judicial capacities confirmed the attitude taken up by them as patriots.

The options before the prisoners were therefore three in number.  One course would be to enter upon a protracted trial before a Boer jury and a specially-appointed judge, with the certainty for the majority of an adverse verdict in any case.  In such a trial numberless occasions would arise for the exercise of discretion in the admission or rejection of evidence, and any defence of the prisoners must necessarily partake of the character of an indictment against the Government and the faction which both judge and jury avowedly represented, and tend only to aggravate the penalty.  They would moreover have to face that trial as a body of over sixty men, many of whom could have reasonably set up special defences, many of whom were not even mentioned in any evidence which the Government had