Kruger wrote, "Rhodes represented capital, no matter how base and contemptible, and whether by lying, bribery or treachery, all and every means were welcome to him if they led to the attainment of his ambitious desires." But Oom Paul was absolutely wrong in thinking that it was the personage he was thus describing who practised all these abominations. He ought to have remembered that it was his name only which was associated with all these basenesses, and the man himself, if left to his better self, would never have condescended to the many acts of doubtful morality with which his memory will remain associated in history. I am firmly convinced that on his own impulse he would never, for instance, have ventured on the Raid. But, unhappily, his habit, when something "not quite" was mentioned to him, was to say nothing and to trust to his good luck to avoid unpleasant consequences arising out of his silence. Had he ventured to oppose the plans of his confederates they would have immediately turned upon him, and ... There were, perhaps, past facts which he did not wish the world to remember. His frequent fits of raging temper arose from this irksome feeling, and was his way--a futile way--of revenging himself on his jailors for the durance in which they kept him. The man who believed himself to be omnipotent in South Africa, and who was considered so powerful by the world at large, was in reality in the hands of the very organisations he had helped to build. It was not Cecil John Rhodes' will which was paramount in the South African League. Kruger spoke absolutely the truth when he asserted that it was essential "to know something about the Chartered Company before it was possible to realise the true perspective of the history of South Africa during the closing years of the last century." Another of Kruger's sweeping assertions--and one which he never backed by anything tangible--was when he further wrote that Rhodes was "one of the most unscrupulous characters that ever existed, whose motto was 'the end justifies the means,' a motto that contains a creed which represents the whole man." Rhodes by nature was not half so unscrupulous as Kruger himself, but he was surrounded by unscrupulous people, whom he was too indolent to repulse. He was constantly paying the price of his former faults and errors in allowing his name to serve as a shield for the ambitions of those who were in no way worthy of him and who constantly abused his confidence.