a precedent, so to say, on the cheap, and in the same spirit to intimidate others among the Reformers who were believed not to have lost their interest in the cause of reform nor to have abandoned their intention to begin again as soon as they were free to do so.  It is no exaggeration to say that scarcely a week could have passed during the last two and a half years in which some or all of the half dozen Uitlanders most prominent in the cause of reform have not been in receipt of a warning of one kind or another, ranging from apparently friendly advice not to take too keen an interest in certain matters, up to the giddy eminence of being black listed in the Dutch papers as one of those to be dragged out and shot without trial as a traitor and a rebel.  Such are the conditions under which the unarmed Uitlanders labour for reform.

{41} (July, 1899.) Du Plessis was promoted to be Chief Inspector of Prisons shortly after the release of Messrs. Sampson and Davies, and still holds that post!

PART II.

A POSTSCRIPT.

CHAPTER X.

THREE YEARS’ GRACE.

Very seldom has any community been in a position so unsatisfactory as that in which the people of Johannesburg found themselves in the year 1896.  Judgments passed in the heat of the moment upon matters which had not been properly explained, and which in many cases were completely obscured by deliberate misrepresentation, had incurred for the community dislike contempt and mistrust which were wholly undeserved.  Those who knew the facts and who were able and willing to speak, the Reformers themselves, were bonded to abstain from politics for three years under penalty of banishment.  Betrayed, deserted, muzzled, helpless, hopeless, and divided, no community could have been in a more unsatisfactory condition.  It was abundantly clear that the time had been allowed to pass when the Imperial Government might have insisted upon reforms and the fulfilment of the President’s promises—­not in the spirit in which they had been made, but in the spirit in which the President himself had intended the world to construe them.  The impact of the revelations was too great to permit of public judgment quickly recovering its balance.  It was realized that Mr. Kruger’s effects had been admirably stage-managed and that for the time being, and possibly for a very considerable time, the Uitlanders were completely out of court.  There were a few—­but how few!—­whose faith was great and whose conviction that the truth must prevail was abiding, who realized that there was nothing for it but to begin all over again—­to begin and to persevere upon sound lines; and they took heart of such signs as there were and started afresh.