Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

He recognised long ago, for instance, that our most dangerous enemies both at home and abroad are the Germans, and throughout his whole career he has lost no opportunity of checking and checkmating, so far as the cowardice and apathy of the Colonial Office has permitted him, their innumerable and dishonest attempts to undermine the British supremacy in South Africa.

If I were asked to name the three men who hate him most bitterly I think I should say Paul Krüger, Dr. W. J. Leyds and the German Emperor. It is something more than a coincidence that these three men should also be the bitterest and most determined enemies of the British Empire.

There can hardly be any doubt now in the minds of well-informed people that the conditions which provoked the pitiful attempt at revolution in Johannesburg and led up to the Jameson Raid were made in Germany, or at any rate by German hands. The whole thing was what may be described with more force than elegance as “a put up job.”

The idea was to goad the Outlanders to revolt, put the rebellion down by armed force, assert the absolute independence of the Transvaal as a consequence, and get rid of that awkward clause in the Convention of 1884 which asserts the suzerainty of Great Britain over the Transvaal by compelling the Pretorian government to submit all its foreign treaties to the supervision of the Colonial Office.

The next step would have been an offensive and defensive alliance with Germany, and then, if there had been no Special Squadrons or obstacles of that sort in the way, the Transvaal would have been gradually Germanised.

It was this that Cecil Rhodes foresaw when he ordered Dr. Jameson to mass his men on the Transvaal frontier. This was, in fact, his answer to the German application to the Portuguese Government for permission to land sailors and marines from the See-Adler in Delagoa Bay with a view to sending them up to Pretoria in violation of the most explicit treaty obligations.

It is quite plain now that Cecil Rhodes intended this force as a practical hint, and not as an invading army. I remember one night shortly after the Raid, I was smoking the pipe of peace with some of the Transvaal officials on the stoep of President Krüger’s house in Pretoria. We were discussing Cecil Rhodes’s complicity in the Raid, and in answer to a suggestion that he was at the bottom of it all, I said: “No doubt Rhodes knew all about it. I needn’t tell you gentlemen that nothing happens in South Africa that he doesn’t know, but he never meant Jameson to cross the frontier when he did. If he had meant invasion he would have had the country by now, but you won’t convince me that Cecil Rhodes is such a fool as to try and jump the Transvaal with five hundred men.”

The only answer to this was a general laugh. President Krüger is not supposed to understand English, but he laughed too.

Of Cecil Rhodes’s enemies at home it is so difficult to speak with anything like patience that they had better be passed over as briefly as possible. The unceasing hostility of a certain section of the British Press may, to some extent, be accounted for by the fact that he has many powerful financial rivals, and that the Transvaal Government has almost unique opportunities for bribery.

Few newspapers are quite incorruptible. They are primarily run to pay, and, therefore, it is hardly to be expected that they should be entirely proof against the manifold seductions which an individual millionaire, or a government with a vast secret service fund, is able to practise upon them.