ifesto? No. Those things were
perfectly clear, perfectly comprehensible.

But at this point the puzzles and riddles and confusions begin to flock
in. You have arrived at a place which you cannot quite understand.

For you find that as a preparation for this loyal, lawful, and in every
way unexceptionable attempt to persuade the government to right their
grievances, the Uitlanders had smuggled a Maxim gun or two and 1,500
muskets into the town, concealed in oil tanks and coal cars, and had
begun to form and drill military companies composed of clerks, merchants,
and citizens generally.

What was their idea? Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them
for petitioning, for redress? That could not be.

Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them even for issuing a
Manifesto demanding relief under the existing government?

Yes, they apparently believed so, because the air was full of talk of
forcing the government to grant redress if it were not granted
peacefully.

The Reformers were men of high intelligence. If they were in earnest,
they were taking extraordinary risks. They had enormously valuable
properties to defend; their town was full of women and children; their
mines and compounds were packed with thousands upon thousands of sturdy
blacks. If the Boers attacked, the mines would close, the blacks would
swarm out and get drunk; riot and conflagration and the Boers together
might lose the Reformers more in a day, in money, blood, and suffering,
than the desired political relief could compensate in ten years if they
won the fight and secured the reforms.

It is May, 1897, now; a year has gone by, and the confusions of that day
have been to a considerable degree cleared away. Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Dr.
Jameson, and others responsible for the Raid, have testified before the
Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry in London, and so have Mr. Lionel
Phillips and other Johannesburg Reformers, monthly-nurses of the
Revolution which was born dead. These testimonies have thrown light.
Three books have added much to this light:

"South Africa As It Is," by Mr. Statham, an able writer partial to the
Boers; "The Story of an African Crisis," by Mr. Garrett, a brilliant
writer partial to Rhodes; and "A Woman's Part in a Revolution," by Mrs.
John Hays Hammond, a vigorous and vivid diarist, partial to the
Reformers. By liquifying the evidence of the prejudiced books and of the
prejudiced parliamentary witnesses an