Then came the Jameson Raid, provoked by misgovernment and by the growing exasperation throughout the British Empire, but in itself indefensible. It failed signally, and left no heroic memory of resolute fighting to the end against overpowering odds, but only shame and sorrow in its trail. Yet it at least served to rivet the gaze of England upon what was happening in South Africa. Even before the raid the Transvaal Government had begun to arm; it now proceeded to build up a great military power, purchasing cannon literally by the hundred and rifles by the thousand, erecting immense fortifications at Pretoria and Johannesburg, and concluding a secret alliance with the Orange Free State. The money for these armaments was wrung from the Outlanders. By the lavish use of secret service funds the press of Continental Europe was set yelling against England, and treason was fomented in Cape Colony. [Sidenote: 1881-1896.] The treatment of the Outlanders went from bad to worse, till Englishmen and Englishwomen were murdered, like Edgar and Mrs. Applebee, without redress. No great nation could permit its subjects to suffer continued humiliation in a country over which that nation had certain rights--however shadowy--and it grew monthly more certain that Great Britain must at last intervene. [Illustration: COLESBERG: PRESIDENT KRUGER'S BIRTH-PLACE. Seventy-four years ago Paul Kruger was born in the neighbourhood of Colesberg in Cape Colony. He left it with his parents in 1837, at the time of "the Great Trek," and travelled northwards to the wild country, which eventually became the South African Republic.] [Sidenote: Kruger.] The president and the evil genius of the Transvaal through this epoch was Stephanus Paulus Johannes Kruger, born in Cape Colony on October 10, 1825. He was a man of indomitable courage and extraordinary force of character--a fighting man from his youth up. His coolness was shown on one occasion, when, out hunting, he suddenly one day, from the top of a kopje--a hillock such as cover the surface of the upland plains of South Africa--saw a large number of Kaffirs evidently advancing to attack him. He sat calmly down without betraying the slightest trepidation, shook the sand from his rough raw-hide shoes, and then waved and signalled with his rifle as if to a considerable force of Boers behind him under shelter of the kopje. The Kaffirs, convinced by his show of boldness that he was not alone, precipitately retreated. [Sidenote: His character.]