A hired bar-room specimen would go from house to house and have the mother put her name down and the names of all her children, first telling her it was the wish of Rhodes and the so-called big men of Johannesburg. Cape niggers would give their names, and the bar-room specimen would write them down, for the niggers could not write their names. There were men in Johannesburg who made it a profession to get up petitions, charging so much for every hundred names. The Rhodes crew employed these fellows at $25 per hundred names. These fellows would then go to their rooms, write down a few hundred names, as they came to their minds, and would then turn in the list, receive their money, and proceed to their rooms to repeat the process. That is the way that petition was gotten up, and it recited enough grievances to stagger the world. I used to talk with the people, and many of them, too, every day, and it was a rare exception when I found one who ever saw the petition. When completed, it was forwarded to Sir Alfred Milner, Cape Town. He looked at it, pronounced it correct, and forwarded it to Downing Street. When Sir Alfred Milner reported that he had investigated the names on that petition, and found them correct, he knows, I know, and the people of Johannesburg know, that he was guilty of a deliberate falsehood. Milner was sent to South Africa for a purpose. His predecessor would have thrown that petition into the waste basket. He could not be handled by Rhodes; so it became necessary to get rid of him, and out he went. Milner was just the man for the place, for he was an educated man, suave and gentlemanly, and, best of all, he was easily led by such a moneyed man as Rhodes. Now you have what I call a trinity, three in one, but apparently three distinct individuals, Chamberlain, Milner, Rhodes, three names that will in time appear on the first page of the history of the decline and fall of the British Empire, as the cause of the beginning of the end. With Chamberlain in Downing Street, Rhodes and all his money in South Africa, and weak Mr. Milner in the middle and ready at hand, it was inevitable that the great struggle must come, in which thousands of innocent people must fall, and the plains of South Africa be reddened with their blood.