It was this that Cecil Rhodes foresaw when he ordered Dr. Jameson to mass his men on the Transvaal frontier. This was, in fact, his answer to the German application to the Portuguese Government for permission to land sailors and marines from the _See-Adler_ in Delagoa Bay with a view to sending them up to Pretoria in violation of the most explicit treaty obligations. It is quite plain now that Cecil Rhodes intended this force as a practical hint, and not as an invading army. I remember one night shortly after the Raid, I was smoking the pipe of peace with some of the Transvaal officials on the stoep of President Krüger’s house in Pretoria. We were discussing Cecil Rhodes’s complicity in the Raid, and in answer to a suggestion that he was at the bottom of it all, I said: “No doubt Rhodes knew all about it. I needn’t tell you gentlemen that nothing happens in South Africa that he doesn’t know, but he never meant Jameson to cross the frontier when he did. If he had meant invasion he would have had the country by now, but you won’t convince me that Cecil Rhodes is such a fool as to try and jump the Transvaal with five hundred men.” The only answer to this was a general laugh. President Krüger is not supposed to understand English, but he laughed too. Of Cecil Rhodes’s enemies at home it is so difficult to speak with anything like patience that they had better be passed over as briefly as possible. The unceasing hostility of a certain section of the British Press may, to some extent, be accounted for by the fact that he has many powerful financial rivals, and that the Transvaal Government has almost unique opportunities for bribery. Few newspapers are quite incorruptible. They are primarily run to pay, and, therefore, it is hardly to be expected that they should be entirely proof against the manifold seductions which an individual millionaire, or a government with a vast secret service fund, is able to practise upon them. It is almost impossible to believe that their hostility is really sincere. They know perfectly well that empire-making cannot be done with kid gloves on. They know, also, that the amount of actual good that Cecil Rhodes has done in South Africa, even apart from empire-making, is almost incalculable. None know this better than the loyal Dutch burghers of the Cape and the Kaffirs. The former call him “the Englishman with the Afrikander heart”; the latter call him their father. But for him there would probably not be many loyal Dutch at all at the Cape; and but for him also Matabeleland and Mashonaland would still be the happy hunting-ground of King Lobengula’s murdering, ravaging, and slave-making impis. [Illustration: THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS.]