Chapter 66

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

When I scribbled in my note-book a year ago the paragraph which ends the
preceding chapter, it was meant to indicate, in an extravagant form, two
things: the conflicting nature of the information conveyed by the citizen
to the stranger concerning South African politics, and the resulting
confusion created in the stranger's mind thereby.

But it does not seem so very extravagant now. Nothing could in that
disturbed and excited time make South African politics clear or quite
rational to the citizen of the country because his personal interest and
his political prejudices were in his way; and nothing could make those
politics clear or rational to the stranger, the sources of his
information being such as they were.

I was in South Africa some little time. When I arrived there the
political pot was boiling fiercely. Four months previously, Jameson had
plunged over the Transvaal border with about 600 armed horsemen at his
back, to go to the "relief of the women and children" of Johannesburg; on
the fourth day of his march the Boers had defeated him in battle, and
carried him and his men to Pretoria, the capital, as prisoners; the Boer
government had turned Jameson and his officers over to the British
government for trial, and shipped them to England; next, it had arrested
64 important citizens of Johannesburg as raid-conspirators, condemned
their four leaders to death, then commuted the sentences, and now the 64
were waiting, in jail, for further results. Before midsummer they were
all out excepting two, who refused to sign the petitions for release; 58
had been fined $10,000 each and enlarged, and the four leaders had gotten
off with fines of $125,000 each with permanent exile added, in one case.

Those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger, and I was glad.
to be in the thick of the excitement. Everybody was talking, and I
expected to understand the whole of one side of it in a very little
while.

I was disappointed. There were singularities, perplexities,
unaccountabilities about it which I was not able to master. I had no
personal access to Boers--their side was a secret to me, aside from what
I was able to gather of it from published statements. My sympathies were
soon with the Reformers in the Pretoria jail, with their friends, and
with their cause. By diligent inquiry in Johannesburg I found out
--apparently--all the details of their side of the quarrel except one--what
they expected to accomplish by an armed rising.

Nobody seemed to know.

The reason why the Reformers were discontented and wanted some changes
made, seemed quite clear. In