[85] It is hardly necessary to point out the absurdity of the suggestion that the Company intended to seize the Transvaal for itself. The Company could no more have taken the Transvaal than it could have taken Natal. It was for self-government that the insurgent-Uitlanders were to rise, and they would have objected to be governed by the Company at least as much as they objected to be governed by the Boers. Such individual members of the Company as held Rand mining shares would have profited by the better administration of the country under a reformed Government, but they would have profited in exactly the same way as shareholders in Paris or Amsterdam. This point, obvious enough to any one who knows South Africa, is clearly put by M. Mermeix, in his interesting little book, La Révolution de Johannesburg. Other fanciful hypotheses have been put forward, which it seems needless to notice.
[86] Much controversy has arisen as to the promise which the Boer commandant made, when the police force surrendered, that the lives of its leaders should be spared. Whatever might have happened immediately after the surrender, they would in any case not have been put to death in cold blood at Pretoria, for that would have been a blunder, which a man so astute and so far from cruel as the President would not have committed.
[87] When a conspiracy succeeds, the chief conspirator is usually some one already wielding some civil or military power, as Louis Napoleon did when he overcame the French Assembly in 1851.
[88] It is still doubtful whether very large areas can be irrigated by means of artesian wells.
[89] The Transvaal coal-fields are said to extend over 56,000 square miles; there is also a coal-field in the eastern part of Cape Colony, near the borders of the Orange Free State.
[90] I leave the pages that follow as they were written in 1897 (reserving for another place a reference to events which have happened since), because I desire that the views therein expressed, which I hold quite as strongly now as in 1889, should be known to have been formed and stated before the deplorable events of the last few months (Oct. 1899).