I was in South Africa some little time.  When I arrived there the political pot was boiling fiercely.  Four months previously, Jameson had plunged over the Transvaal border with about 600 armed horsemen at his back, to go to the “relief of the women and children” of Johannesburg; on the fourth day of his march the Boers had defeated him in battle, and carried him and his men to Pretoria, the capital, as prisoners; the Boer government had turned Jameson and his officers over to the British government for trial, and shipped them to England; next, it had arrested 64 important citizens of Johannesburg as raid-conspirators, condemned their four leaders to death, then commuted the sentences, and now the 64 were waiting, in jail, for further results.  Before midsummer they were all out excepting two, who refused to sign the petitions for release; 58 had been fined $10,000 each and enlarged, and the four leaders had gotten off with fines of $125,000 each with permanent exile added, in one case.

Those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger, and I was glad. to be in the thick of the excitement.  Everybody was talking, and I expected to understand the whole of one side of it in a very little while.

I was disappointed.  There were singularities, perplexities, unaccountabilities about it which I was not able to master.  I had no personal access to Boers—­their side was a secret to me, aside from what I was able to gather of it from published statements.  My sympathies were soon with the Reformers in the Pretoria jail, with their friends, and with their cause.  By diligent inquiry in Johannesburg I found out —­apparently—­all the details of their side of the quarrel except one—­what they expected to accomplish by an armed rising.

Nobody seemed to know.

The reason why the Reformers were discontented and wanted some changes made, seemed quite clear.  In Johannesburg it was claimed that the Uitlanders (strangers, foreigners) paid thirteen-fifteenths of the Transvaal taxes, yet got little or nothing for it.  Their city had no charter; it had no municipal government; it could levy no taxes for drainage, water-supply, paving, cleaning, sanitation, policing.  There was a police force, but it was composed of Boers, it was furnished by the State Government, and the city had no control over it.  Mining was very costly; the government enormously increased the cost by putting burdensome taxes upon the mines, the output, the machinery, the buildings; by burdensome imposts upon incoming materials; by burdensome railway-freight-charges.  Hardest of all to bear, the government reserved to itself a monopoly in that essential thing, dynamite, and burdened it with an extravagant price.  The detested Hollander from over the water held all the public offices.  The government was rank with corruption.  The Uitlander had no vote, and must live in the State ten or twelve years before he could get one.  He was not represented in the Raad