“What Mr. Rhodes did,” wrote Mr. Lecky, in his strong, trenchant way, “has been very clearly established. When holding the highly confidential position of Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and being at the same time a Privy Councillor of the Queen, he engaged in a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Government of a neighbouring and friendly State. In order to carry out this design, he deceived the High Commissioner whose Prime Minister he was. He deceived his own colleagues in the Ministry. He collected under false pretences a force which was intended to co-operate with an insurrection in Johannesburg. Being a Director of the Chartered Company, he made use of that position without the knowledge of his colleagues to further the conspiracy. He took an active and secret part in smuggling great quantities of arms into the Transvaal, which were intended to be used in the rebellion; and at a time when his organs in the Press were representing Johannesburg as seething with spontaneous indignation against an oppressive Government, he, with another millionaire, was secretly expending many thousands of pounds in that town in stimulating and subsidizing the rising. He was also directly connected with the shabbiest incident in the whole affair, the concoction of a letter from the Johannesburg conspirators absurdly representing English women and children at Johannesburg as in danger of being shot down by the Boers, and urging the British to come at once and save them. It was a letter drawn up with the sanction of Mr. Rhodes many weeks before the raid, and before any disturbance had arisen; and kept in reserve to be dated and used in the last moment for the purpose of inducing the young soldiers in South Africa to join in the raid, and of subsequently justifying their conduct before the War Office, and also for the purpose of being published in the English Press at the same time as the first news of the raid in order to work upon English opinion, and persuade the English people that the raid, though technically wrong was morally justifiable.... No reasonable judge can question that in these transactions he was more blamable than those who were actually punished by the law for taking part in the raid, far more blamable than those young officers who were, in truth, the most severely punished and who had been induced to take part in it under false representation of the wishes of the Government at home, and a grossly false representation of the state of things at Johannesburg. The failure of the raid, and his undoubted complicity with its design, obliged Mr. Rhodes to resign the post of Prime Minister, and his directorship of the Chartered Company.... But what can be thought of the language of a Minister who volunteered to assure the House of Commons that in all the transactions I have described, Mr. Rhodes, though he had made ‘a gigantic mistake,’ a mistake perhaps as great as a statesman could make, had done nothing affecting his personal honour?”