kind: the sterile labour of those entrenchments that still scar the veld, and then the fresh graves in the little pieces of enclosed ground on the hillsides. The untaught lesson has written itself out in the long lists of ignorant colonial rebels, who have learnt late in that school whose fees are high. Faithlessness to Afrikander followers used to be the charge against Rhodes in 1896. Better spare bitter names. If we all had our deserts in this tangled business, who—accused or accusers—should escape a whipping?
It is curious to speculate now in what form the crisis would have come if Rhodes had stood aside and let Johannesburg be. What hurried him was not fear of the Kruger junta alone, nor of the cosmopolitan Rand alone, but of an anti-British bargain between the two—a great industrial Republic working to unite South Africa outside the Empire. Kruger was no such Machiavelli. How easy it would be to avoid our own blunders if we could only foresee those of the other side! Rhodes failed to foresee that the old Boer caste would reject terms to the end, and that Dr. Leyds and the rest of the clever fools from Holland, instead of rising to the conception Rhodes dreaded, would waste their shallow talents on the back-stairs of European chancelleries. It is often said that had there been no Raid there would have been no war. That is the old unhistorical trick of picking out one effect in a chain of effects and calling it the cause. It is sometimes added that Rhodes planned the Raid with that purpose. I do not think any historian will take that view. He might have sat still and let the drift to war go on its own way. But war at the best must mean throwing all his patient past and his plans under the trampling hoofs of violence. It meant making himself unnecessary. No; the case with Rhodes was that he saw the crisis hurrying past him, and could not bring himself to let its threads slip out of his own hands; so he dashed at the runaway—and failed. He did not make the weather, but, like Kruger, when he cried, 'Let the storm burst!'
