And yet even this attack is in its way a sort of testimonial to the greatness of the man whose reputation it was intended to demolish, despite the fact that in it Cecil Rhodes is depicted as a monster of iniquity and as the head of a soulless and tyrannical corporation which has not only been guilty of all the crimes in the Decalogue, but has invented a few new ones to go on with. Strange to say, however, when Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner was once interrupted in one of her well-known denunciations of the greatest Englishman of his day with the remark that after all he was a great man, she exclaimed: “A great man! Of course he is, a very great man, and that’s the pity of it!” The almost unanimous verdict of the English and South African press on the deplorable literary and political blunder which Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner perpetrated in writing “Trooper Peter Halkett,” goes far to show that her personal estimate of her enemy is a good deal more correct than her literary and political estimate. Of the public enemies of Cecil Rhodes it will suffice to point out briefly that, without one exception and whatever their nationality, they are also the enemies of his country. It is noteworthy too that Cecil Rhodes himself seems to have an instinctive perception of real as distinguished from apparent or merely superficial hostility to the British Empire. He recognised long ago, for instance, that our most dangerous enemies both at home and abroad are the Germans, and throughout his whole career he has lost no opportunity of checking and checkmating, so far as the cowardice and apathy of the Colonial Office has permitted him, their innumerable and dishonest attempts to undermine the British supremacy in South Africa. If I were asked to name the three men who hate him most bitterly I think I should say Paul Krüger, Dr. W. J. Leyds and the German Emperor. It is something more than a coincidence that these three men should also be the bitterest and most determined enemies of the British Empire. There can hardly be any doubt now in the minds of well-informed people that the conditions which provoked the pitiful attempt at revolution in Johannesburg and led up to the Jameson Raid were made in Germany, or at any rate by German hands. The whole thing was what may be described with more force than elegance as “a put up job.” The idea was to goad the Outlanders to revolt, put the rebellion down by armed force, assert the absolute independence of the Transvaal as a consequence, and get rid of that awkward clause in the Convention of 1884 which asserts the suzerainty of Great Britain over the Transvaal by compelling the Pretorian government to submit all its foreign treaties to the supervision of the Colonial Office. The next step would have been an offensive and defensive alliance with Germany, and then, if there had been no Special Squadrons or obstacles of that sort in the way, the Transvaal would have been gradually Germanised.