This German organised rebellion owed its defeat largely to the fact that the Dutch in the Colony knew by experience how little reliance was to be placed in German promises. The Boer is beginning to recognise that the word of a German is binding only in as far as it serves his own end. The memories of men who fought in the late Boer war are not all as conveniently short as their German advisers hoped. Brand, in his historical letter to de Wet, emphasised this point in his reply to de Wet's earnest exhortation to him to depart from the policy he had adopted and join the rebellion, which he insisted arose out of a spirit of deep indignation at the unholy act of the Government in attacking German South-West Africa. "I am satisfied," Colonel Brand wrote in reply, "of the justice of the standpoint taken up by me. Even better than myself you know how deeply disappointed we were in the people whose case you so arduously espouse to-day. Not only did we receive no help from them in the last war, but the Kaiser even went to the extent of advising the British Government how to attack and destroy us. What an insult to our people when the late State President of the Transvaal personally applied to them and was turned back on the border." These things are not easily forgotten, and they are less easily pardoned. The good faith of a nation cannot rest upon lies. Matheson knew nothing of the letter Cornelius had written to his wife; but he gathered from what he heard in De Aar, and from the talk of some Dutchmen with whom he travelled to the coast, that the rebellion was half-hearted, that already the men were realising that they had been misguided and were forsaking their leaders and going quietly back to their farms. In a few months it was prophesied Botha would have crushed the rising and restored order in the country. And the men who were now so bitter against him would come to admit the wisdom of his policy, and respect him for the generous nature of his opposition, which followed consistently the principle of suppressing the rebellion with firmness, of sparing life when mercy could be judiciously extended, and of pardoning the offenders. It is possible only for great natures to be generous and for wise natures to be impartial. The Union was fortunate in its time of crisis in having at its head a man in whom both these qualities were combined. The quashing of their carefully planned schemes in South Africa was one of Germany's bitterest blows.