e to hold
Johannesburg for a couple of days against any force the Boers could
bring.[13] Nor in the light of what happened, during the war, both at
Mafeking and Kimberley, can this expectation be thought extravagant.
Here his responsibilities would have ended. The High Commissioner and
the Imperial Government would have done the rest. To indulge in
metaphor, the Imperial locomotive was to be set going, but the lines
on which it was to run were those laid down by Mr. Rhodes.

[Footnote 13: It is worth noticing that even the presence of
the German Marines at Delagoa Bay was
counterbalanced--whether by chance or design--by the
coincidence of the arrival of a British troopship with
time-expired men from the Indian garrison, off Durban.]

If this was the essence of Rhodes's plan, it would matter
comparatively little whether the Reformers had, or had not, completed
their preparations, or whether Dr. Jameson had 1,200 or 500 men.
Certainly some such assumption is necessary to account for the fact
that Rhodes treated his confederates at Johannesburg as so many pawns
on a chess-board. It is equally necessary to account for Dr. Jameson's
action. "Twenty years friends, and now he goes in and ruins me," was
Rhodes's comment on the news that Dr. Jameson had "ridden in," in
spite of his own orders to the contrary and the message to the same
effect which Captain Heany had delivered on behalf of the Reformers.
But what if Dr. Jameson knew, or thought that he knew, that Rhodes's
object in forcing the insurrection was not to make the Uitlanders
reduce Krueger, but to compel the Imperial Government to step in? In
this case he may well have thought that what was essential was not
that the rising should be successful, but that there should be a
rising of any kind; provided that it was sufficiently grave to arrest
the attention of the world, and claim the interference of the Imperial
Government.

According to Mr. Chamberlain the continued inaction of the Imperial
Government in the eighteen months that had passed since Lord Loch's
visit to Pretoria in June, 1894, was due to two circumstances. In the
first place, "the Uitlanders and their organs had always deprecated
the introduction into the dispute of what is called in South Africa
the 'Imperial factor'"; and in the second, the "rumours" of violent
measures "were continually falsified by the event." Obviously, if
Rhodes forced an insurrection