Up to September 1886 there was not a single house on the site of the now flourishing town of Johannesburg. It owes its existence entirely to the discovery of gold, of which a reef 130 miles long runs through the town and district.
A DUST STORM IN JOHANNESBURG.
This is a very cloudy view of Goldopolis. Periodically, especially in winter, vast dust storms prevail, which obscure everything with an opaque gritty haze as thick as a London fog, and far more unpleasant.
The tone of the Dutch Parliament or Raad reflected the temper of the whole Boer community, which may have been suited to the seventeenth century, but was wholly out of place at the close of the nineteenth. Pillar-boxes were effeminate; locusts were a plague sent from God, and might not be interfered with; railways had not the divine blessing and brought all manner of calamity; the firing of bombs to bring down rain was impious profanity; the size of neckties ought to be regulated by the authorities. At every turn there were fierce expressions of hatred for England and Englishmen. Foreigners were called in to help hold down the English; the government openly and undisguisedly coquetted with Germany and with any power which it believed hostile to the British Empire.
The Jameson Raid.
Then came the Jameson Raid, provoked by misgovernment and by the growing exasperation throughout the British Empire, but in itself indefensible. It failed signally, and left no heroic memory of resolute fighting to the end against overpowering odds, but only shame and sorrow in its trail. Yet it at least served to rivet the gaze of England upon what was happening in South Africa. Even before the raid the Transvaal Government had begun to arm; it now proceeded to build up a great military power, purchasing cannon literally by the hundred and rifles by the thousand, erecting immense fortifications at Pretoria and Johannesburg, and concluding a secret alliance with the Orange Free State. The money for these armaments was wrung from the Outlanders. By the lavish use of secret service funds the press of Continental Europe was set yelling against England, and treason was fomented in Cape Colony.
1881-1896.
The treatment of the Outlanders went from bad to worse, till Englishmen and Englishwomen were murdered, like Edgar and Mrs. Applebee, without redress. No great nation could permit its subjects to suffer continued humiliation in a country over which that nation had certain rights—however shadowy—and it grew monthly more certain that Great Britain must at last intervene.
