Some people maintain that, though perhaps the Boer farmers
themselves were not in it, yet their leaders were. But the farmers form
the vast majority of the Boers. They are an independent and stiff-necked
type; and it is as absurd to suppose that their leaders could pledge
them to such vast and visionary schemes as it is to suppose that such
schemes could have the slightest interest for them. As a matter of fact,
what has given old Kruger his long ascendency is the way in which he
shares and embodies the one or two simple, dogged ideas of the mass of
the Burghers. "God bless the Boers and damn the British" are two of the
chief of these, but they only apply them within their own borders.
But it's a case of the proof of the pudding. If this scheme for a
general rising existed, why is not the Colony in arms now? What do you
think the answer to that is? Why, that the plot did indeed exist and had
been carefully matured, and that it would have come off all right if the
Boers had marched boldly south; but that, for some unknown reason, their
hearts failed them at the last moment, and they didn't dare go on and
reap what they had sown. "If only they had marched on Cape Town, the
whole Colony would have risen."
Doesn't it sometimes occur to you that, when his own interests are
concerned, the Boer is a tolerably wide-awake gentleman, and that he
knows how to look after those interests of his almost as well as we can
teach him? Are you prepared to believe of him: first, that he laid down
and organised this vast conspiracy; second, that he deliberately armed
himself to the teeth with a view of carrying it out; third, that he
chose his own time for war and declared it when he thought the moment
was ripe; fourth, that he gained advantages to begin with, and had the
Colony at his feet; and fifth, that he was seized with a sudden
paralysis at the last moment, and found himself unable to march ahead
and gather in the recruits who were on tip-toe to join him? No, no.
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