CHAPTER XXVII
A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE
The following evening found Steve’s new acquaintance, true to his promise, seated at a table with our hero, partaking of a cup of tea and biscuits. After tea, Steve brought forth a box of his favourite Dutch cigars. The genial old Scotchman did not wait long to press Steve to continue their conversation of the night before, which seemed greatly to interest him. So, both being comfortably seated in a couple of easy-chairs, Steve proceeded to read the cutting of which he had spoken the night before, and we shall make no apology for reproducing it, as it will prove of interest to those readers who have heard of the Uitlander grievances (?) but have never heard the other side of the matter.
As you will see, it is a letter written to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle and taken over by the Pretoria Press. This is it:—
‘The following important and timely communication on Transvaal affairs has been addressed to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle and appears in the leading journal under date the 1st inst: When the Times in one and the same issue, that of the 27th inst., publishes among the telegrams that most remarkable letter from Mr Schreiner, late Attorney-General to the Cape Colony under Mr Rhodes, on the cause of the attempted rebellion at Johannesburg, and publishes under the head of “The Colonies,” the statement that it was “the intolerably bad administration of President Kruger’s Government,” I think it is the duty of those who know what they are writing about to set the public at rest as to what were and what were not the real causes.
‘For the Times it should have been enough that the
FIRM AND ENTHUSIASTIC ADMIRER
and follower of Mr Cecil Rhodes, his trusted Attorney-General in two Administrations, distinctly and almost brutally, three weeks after the rebellion, when in possession of all the facts—facts which we shall know in all their detail in three weeks time—declares the rebellion to have been “due to a body of commercial speculators, the machinations of the Chartered Company, to a minute but powerful body of speculators in concert with financial plotters outside,” and much more to the same purpose. Mr Schreiner has nothing to say about the intolerably bad administration of President Kruger having been the cause, and he would not have been slow to put this reason forward if he in conscience could have done so. But
THE MANIFESTO OF MR CHARLES LEONARD
says so. Yes, and it is about the manifesto that I wish to set the public right once and for all; and my claim to write on this subject is not to be disputed, as the oldest continual resident at Johannesburg, from its very inception until six months ago, intimately conversant with men and with measures during the whole of that period. There is no doubt much to be blamed in the past and much to be improved in the future. I am not a defender of the Kruger régime à outrance; but the faults that have been committed and the omissions that are laid to its charge are the natural consequence of the rapid and