The Uitlander seems to have expected something very different from all that.  I do not know why.  Nothing different from it was rationally to be expected.  A round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right away.  He must have time to modify his shape.  The modification had begun in a detail or two, before the Raid, and was making some progress.  It has made further progress since.  There are wise men in the Boer government, and that accounts for the modification; the modification of the Boer mass has probably not begun yet.  If the heads of the Boer government had not been wise men they would have hanged Jameson, and thus turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr.  But even their wisdom has its limits, and they will hang Mr. Rhodes if they ever catch him.  That will round him and complete him and make him a saint.  He has already been called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur, and he ought to rise to this one, the grandest of all.  It will be a dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is nothing, it will land him in good company and be a pleasant change for him.

Some of the things demanded by the Johannesburgers’ Manifesto have been conceded since the days of the Raid, and the others will follow in time, no doubt.  It was most fortunate for the miners of Johannesburg that the taxes which distressed them so much were levied by the Boer government, instead of by their friend Rhodes and his Chartered Company of highwaymen, for these latter take half of whatever their mining victims find, they do not stop at a mere percentage.  If the Johannesburg miners were under their jurisdiction they would be in the poorhouse in twelve months.

I have been under the impression all along that I had an unpleasant paragraph about the Boers somewhere in my notebook, and also a pleasant one.  I have found them now.  The unpleasant one is dated at an interior village, and says—­

“Mr. Z. called.  He is an English Afrikander; is an old resident, and has a Boer wife.  He speaks the language, and his professional business is with the Boers exclusively.  He told me that the ancient Boer families in the great region of which this village is the commercial center are falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip of the usurer—­getting hopelessly in debt—­and are losing their high place and retiring to second and lower.  The Boer’s farm does not go to another Boer when he loses it, but to a foreigner.  Some have fallen so low that they sell their daughters to the blacks.”

Under date of another South African town I find the note which is creditable to the Boers: 

“Dr. X. told me that in the Kafir war 1,500 Kafirs took refuge in a great cave in the mountains about 90 miles north of Johannesburg, and the Boers blocked up the entrance and smoked them to death.  Dr. X. has been in there and seen the great array of bleached skeletons—­one a woman with the skeleton of a child hugged to her breast.”