My life and loves Vol. 4

by Frank Harris

  There could be no doubt about the matter. Hercules Robinson was blameless in the affair. He had been kept out of it. Rhodes had found a surer tool in the Imperial Secretary, Sir Graham Bower.

  I rubbed the point in decisively.

  "Your message," I said, "the telegram of the High Commissioner, the most important telegram ever sent from this office, went as an ordinary telegram, and instead of taking precedence, followed some hundreds of others in ordinary sequence to Pretoria; and Krueger sat in council all day, sending message after message to you, and getting no reply, but getting wire after wire from country districts to the effect that Jameson was pushing on towards his capital as hard as he could. Can you expect Krueger to trust the English after this? All that day, all that night, the old man waited, and half the next day before you gave him the chance to act."

  "Good God!" said Robinson.

  "You don't want me any more, Sir?" asked Graham Bower, pointedly, and left the room.

  "What's to be done now?" cried Hercules Robinson, falling into his seat.

  "What's to be done? But how did you know all this? How have you in a few days found out more than I knew, I with such power and experience, and living at the center?"

  A little later I went up to Johannesburg, and while there was asked to go and see the President by Chief Justice Kotze of the High Court. I went across one day to Pretoria. It is like a town set in a saucer with low hills ringing it round; a town of squat Dutch houses set amid trees and little noisy rivulets of water running down the sides of the streets-everywhere the chatter of children and childish games, and quiet home life. And in the strange little provincial town, two or three magnificent public buildings that represent fairly enough the obstinate patriotism of the Boer.

  I was invited to call upon the President at six o'clock in the morning, but I declared that if I got up at that hour I should be at my worst, and I wanted to be at my best. When the President heard that I never got up before the day was well aired, he invited me to come and have coffee with him, and so I called upon him in the early afternoon, called with Chief Justice Kotze, who was kind enough to offer to act as interpreter. The house was an ordinary Boer house, the reception-room an ordinary Boer parlor with wax flowers, colored worsted mats and a huge Bible as its chief ornaments, unless I include the enormous spittoon, which was used at every moment by the master. I hardly dare to describe the coffee. For providing this coffee Krueger got eight hundred a year besides his salary of eight thousand pounds, and I should think that for eight pounds he could make enough of it to float a battleship. It was the vilest liquid I had ever attempted to drink; a very disagreeable decoction of Gregory powder in half-warm milk. I took one sip and left it at that.

  I told about the interview in its main lines in the Saturday Review at that time, and gave the best portrait I could of the village Cromwell called Paul Krueger. Every one is familiar with his likeness to a great gorilla, his porky baboon face, and small piggy grey eyes, but no portrait could give an impression of the massive strength, the power, and restrained passion of the man. He must have been fifty-four inches round the chest, and when seated looked like a Hercules. The worst fault in his gigantic figure was the shortness of his legs. Strange to say, he is one of the few men who has grown greater in my memory, and this in spite of all the rumblings and failings of his later years. Had he been trained, had he had any education or reading, Paul Krueger would have been one of the greatest of men. As it was, he was one of the most remarkable.

  Krueger was suspicious, as the ignorant always are, self-centered like most strong-willed, successful men, but not devoid of heart and conscience. His treatment of the Outlanders in Johannesburg was simply insane. Some eighty thousand of them had made Johannesburg the greatest gold-mining industry in the world; they paid more than nine-tenths of the state taxes.

  Instead of getting just enough to live on-a few hundreds a year-from his twenty thousand Boer burghers, Krueger was now a rich man. The Outlanders had turned the Transvaal from a bankrupt state into the wealthiest in South Africa, with a revenue of three millions sterling a year: yet in 1894 he had made it impossible for them to obtain a vote in a country to which they contributed practically the whole revenue. They had no control even over the affairs of the city they had founded and built up.

  Krueger still treated Johannesburg as a mining camp under his own mining commissioner.

  Dutch was taught in the schools, and not English. Though denied all rights of citizenship and treated as aliens, the Outlanders were nevertheless liable to be impressed for service in native wars. Krueger's iniquities were surely unparalleled. He had given foreigners a concession for the manufacture of dynamite, which was imported into the country by monopolists, and sold at such a price to the mines that it practically imposed a tax of half a million pounds a year on the industry. Another lot of adventurers got the concession for carrying coal along the Rand, which they did at the highest possible rate; another group owned a liquor concession which corrupted the natives.

  The curious thing was that Krueger's treatment of the Outlanders was no worse than his treatment of the Boers in the Cape. He wouldn't allow the Transvaal to enter the Customs Union; and pigs, cattle, and coal from the Cape could be imported only on payment of fantastic duties. The spirit of his policy was shown in one act. When the Transvaal railway management proposed to put up the rate from the Vaal above six-pence a ton in order to kill the Cape traffic, Krueger asked them to make it a shilling; and when the traders left the railway at the Free State border and carried their goods over the short stretch to Johannesburg in bullock-wagons, Krueger proclaimed that the Vaal Drifts, which they had to cross, would be closed to them.

  This last piece of despotism brought a new force into the field. In 1895 Joseph Chamberlain had made himself the Minister of the Colonies; and although he had no liking for Rhodes, still, when Rhodes appealed to him, he took his view and described President Krueger's act about the Drifts as one "almost of hostility," and declared his willingness to back up his protest by force.

  Reluctantly, Krueger saw he had gone too far and threw open the Drifts.

  Then the raid took place, which blotted out even the memory of most of the President's stupidities and threw the onus of flagrant wrong doing upon Rhodes.

  Early in the interview Krueger asked me point blank whether I believed, like Hercules Robinson, that Chamberlain didn't know about the raid. I said, "I couldn't tell: there was no proof. I felt certain the Cabinet didn't know it, and could hardly believe that Mr. Chamberlain would act as dictator in such a matter."

  "The Cabinet didn't know of it?" questioned Krueger. "You are sure?" "As sure as I can be of such a thing," I replied.

  In the back of my mind was the feeling that Chamberlain must have known all about it, may have talked even to Mr. Balfour about it, but I wanted to say rather less than more of what I believed out of patriotic feeling, and so I maintained the possibility of Chamberlain's innocence. Krueger turned on me sharply.

  "You know that Rhodes planned it, paid for it, directed it?" he barked.

  "Surely," I replied. "He confessed as much in Cape Town to Jan Hofmeyr, and I have wired that home to my paper."

  "So," he cried, "you admit that Rhodes was a scoundrel?" "Worse," I replied quietly, "a blundering idiot, to think that five hundred men could beat the Boers."

  The great burly man sprang erect, while his little grey eyes snapped in the fat pork face. He looked like a maddened baboon.

  "Four hundred boys," he shouted. "Do you know what I would have done with them?"

  "No," I said smiling, "I should like to know."

  "What I proposed in council," he roared, glaring at me, "was to lead each by the ear to the border and kick their bottoms back into Bechuana-land."

  "Why didn't you do it?" I cried, shouting with laughter. "Oh, my goodness!

  What a pity you didn't do it and enrich history with a unique scene. The most genial proposal I ever heard. That is what ought to have bee
n done with them: impudence should always be met with contempt."

  My delighted acceptance of his proposal brought the old man to good humor at once, but he was still suspicious.

  "Do you know," he went on, "that one of Jameson's lieutenants, a leader of the raid, an officer in your army, too, told the Bechuanaland police that the raid was looked upon favorably by the government?"

  "But the police," I said, "didn't believe him. If the police had come in as raiders, then the complicity of the government would be difficult to deny."

  "Hercules Robinson is honest," said Krueger, as if to himself, "good, too, but getting old and weak: thinks it clever to speak with two tongues. But we shall soon know."

  "Know what?" I asked.

  "Know whether your government, whether Chamberlain and Rhodes were agreed."

  "How will time help you?" I asked, wondering.

  The old man went into a long explanation which the Chief Justice translated, telling me that notebooks, and telegrams had been found upon the battlefield, and that they had all been decoded, and established the complicity of Rhodes and Beit in the raid up to the hilt. I was told I might go and see the telegrams, and I did see them all the next day, some time early in February, the same telegrams that were published in The Times in May, and caused a sensation.

  But Krueger was not to be diverted for long from the main point.

  "We shall soon know," he repeated, "whether Chamberlain was behind Rhodes or not."

  "How?" I asked.

  "Well," he said, "it is clear that the English people were behind him. Look how they cheer the raiders, and how they talk of them as heroes. But if they punish them that will be clear, and if they punish Rhodes, then I shall know that Chamberlain and the government were not behind him."

  There was such menace in the old man's voice and manner, such rage of anger, that I tried to show him the other side.

  "Difficult," I said "to punish Rhodes. How would you have him punished?"

  "Oh," he cried, "I don't want him punished in money or in person. He was made a Privy Councillor. Let them take that away from him: anything to show their disapproval, and I shall be content. I want to believe that the English government is honest, as it was when Gladstone was there."

  I could not help but admit that that might be done, should be done.

  "If it is not done," cried the old man, "I shall know what to do."

  "What?" I asked.

  He growled and glared, and didn't answer, but one night after dinner Kotze told me that Chamberlain had asked Krueger to come to London and state his case, saying that he would be treated with perfect fairness. I knew that Chamberlain disliked Rhodes, personally, and had never forgiven him for giving ten thousand pounds to Parnell, and when Kotze told me all this, I said to him that I thought I ought to see the President again; and he arranged for the meeting immediately and undertook as before to act as interpreter between us.

  This last interview with Krueger seemed to me very important: first of all, I thanked him for letting Leyds show me the telegrams that proved that the Jameson Raiders were on their way to overthrow the Transvaal government, and I got the President's permission to publish the telegrams as I wished. I then alluded to the trial of the chief raiders and said I hoped that no capital punishment would be inflicted. "It would be ridiculous," I said, "to punish the servants with death and let the master go free." Krueger nodded agreement.

  "President," I added, "as we agree on so much, I want to persuade you to go to London as Chamberlain desires. You will give him the parliamentary triumph which he wants, and in return he will give you a free hand against Rhodes. You needn't fear for the independence of the Transvaal if you do this: it will be insured for our time at least." "Why should I go to London?" he broke in. "Policy," I said, "nothing else. Chamberlain is much more dangerous than Rhodes: if you get Chamberlain on your side, you need fear nothing for the next twenty years."

  "Do you mean," he said, "that otherwise the English would come and try to take the Transvaal again?"

  "I have no right to speak for them," I said, "but I am frightened; Englishmen don't believe that forty or fifty thousand Boers should be allowed to play despots and deprive one hundred thousand Englishmen of political rights in the country which they have made wealthy. You will have to judge the matter, Mr. President," I added, "but Chamberlain is strong either as a friend or an enemy, and I always remember what Ben Franklin, one of the wisest of Americans, said: 'There never was a good war or a bad peace.'"

  "We have a better friend than Chamberlain," he said. "You forget that we have the Almighty God, and He has freed the Transvaal once for all."

  "I can only tell you," I said, "how I think the game should be played; I am no one, you are one of the protagonists."

  "I am glad to have met you," was his concluding speech to me; "for the first time I have met an Englishman who tells me what he considers the exact truth. I hope you will put our case plainly before the public, and I don't say I won't take your advice about Chamberlain, though I dislike the idea of going to London. I have grown old," he barked, "and am tired, and I got nothing in London before."

  "There is much to get there now," were my last words, "and you would win Chamberlain easily."

  Delighted with my praise, the old man said, "As soon as I heard of the raid I got out my rifle and put on my old veltschoon; I was going to lead my burghers against Jameson, but-" he pointed to Kotze, "he and the others persuaded me not to go."

  Whatever Krueger was, he was a great old fighter! It was his courage and combativeness which led him to his ruin. I remember saying to Kotze when we came away: "Unless Krueger goes to London and gives Chamberlain his parliamentary triumph, he will be sorry for it. There is a great text in the Bible; I wonder if you know it: 'If thou hadst known, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes!'"

  Of course Kotze understood. When we parted I told him that I would send the telegrams to the Saturday Review to be published-but I must pass over that story in silence, for it reminded me of the worldly wisdom of Dante's phrase:

  Degli amici guarda mi Dio

  Degli memici mi guardo lo

  "God save me from my friends; my enemies I'll take care of myself."

  In the days that followed, and after my return to England, I saw plainly enough how Krueger's suspicions must be strengthened to certainty. The raiders were received in London by cheering crowds: the leaders, who were punished by short terms of imprisonment, were let out even before the term had been served. Rhodes was regarded everywhere as a hero, and even the commission that was set on foot to bring the truth to light contented itself with finding out little or nothing, and with rewarding instead of punishing the villain.

  One scene from that commission I must give because it is of historic interest; it was the only real attempt made to cross-examine Rhodes before the commission, and it established not only his complicity, but threw a more sinister light on the whole conspiracy; and established finally, in my mind, the guilty complicity of Joseph Chamberlain.

  The chairman of the commission was a Mr. Jackson, whom I had known as Financial Secretary to the Treasury. I had met him at dinners and had had long talks with him, and had learned to appreciate his fair-mindedness and good sense. He gave me a desk to myself, apart from the pressmen's desk in the room where the sittings were held. It was well in front, where I could see and hear everything.

  From the beginning it was evident that it was a white-washing commission.

  Everyone paid the most extravagant deference to Rhodes, a deference which often called forth from him expressions of amused contempt. Chamberlain bowed when he addressed a question to him. Sir Richard Webster was proud to help him to brandy and soda like a waiter. The idea of a millionaire as a criminal in England was too ludicrous for words. Even Labouchere lost all his pert impudence when questioning him. Indeed, poor Labby was at a loss: he was only half-informed, and Rhodes's advocates on the com
mission, and especially Chamberlain, could do what they pleased with him.

  But there was one man on the commission equal to his task, Sir William Veraon Harcourt. He had studied his brief, had made himself familiar with the facts, seemed quietly determined to get at the truth. When he took Rhodes in hand, the relative proportions of the two men became plain at once. Rhodes began to lose his self-confidence, hesitated, hectored. Sir William Vernon Harcourt apologized, used great courtesy, never insisted, but returned with new questions. Again and again Chamberlain interfered to turn the attack, but Sir W. Vernon Harcourt was not to be denied or diverted from the main points; he smiled at Chamberlain and went on pushing in probe after probe in deadly fashion.

  Rhodes and his supporters in the press had been putting forward the notion that the agitation in Johannesburg was a real reform movement, whereas Sir William Vernon Harcourt evidently believed that the cosmopolitan Jew financiers directing the mines in Johannesburg didn't even wish to become citizens of the Transvaal Republic. He had already made it pretty plain that it was a fictitious and carefully fomented agitation. Rhodes, on the other hand, asserted that Jameson had gone in to assist the reformers and to keep order.

  Sir William Vernon Harcourt went on to the morning before the raid and read a telegram from Jameson to Woolff in Johannesburg: "Meet me as arranged before you left on Tuesday night, which will enable us to decide which is the best destination."

  "Can you explain to me, Mr. Rhodes, what is the meaning of those words, 'which is the best destination'?" Thus daintily Sir William Vernon Harcourt placed the bomb upon the table.

  Rhodes pretended indignation.

  "No, I certainly could not; you see, Woolff was at Johannesburg: Jameson telegraphed from Pitsani. I should say the 'best destination' means the best route."

  Sir William Harcourt smiled.

  "That is not the ordinary meaning of destination. Was it proposed that Dr.

  Jameson, instead of going to Johannesburg, should go to Pretoria direct?