e
Uitlanders should hold a series of small indoor meetings in different
localities. The meetings were accordingly held, and they provided
unmistakable evidence of the gravity of the position. By their
numbers, their unanimity, their enthusiasm, and their moderation,
the Uitlanders carried conviction to some and roused the grave
apprehension of others. Among the latter, it is fair to infer, were
President Kruger and his sympathizers in the Free State and Cape
Colony.

There is one disability the existence of which the advocates of the
Uitlander cause are always painfully conscious of. They know as well
as any of their critics that it is no picture which is all
black--that you get no perspective, no effects, without contrasts!
Yet it has not been believed that they were willing to acknowledge
the good that there was, and that a politic instinct no less than a
sense of justice prompted a diligent effort to discover and make much
of the genuinely hopeful signs. The monotony was none of their
making; it was in the nature of the facts, and not of the recital;
but monotony there was, and it was productive of one very bad result.
The conditions, admittedly bad, came to be regarded by a good many as
being only as bad as they had for a long time been known to be,
leaving little hope except through the long slow influence of time,
but causing no immediate anxiety or alarm. Someday a grubbing
historian may read the back files of South African newspapers and
marvel that such warnings should have passed unheeded, but the fact
is that the Transvaal Government and its sympathizers had become
indifferent to warnings followed by no results and accustomed to
prophecies unfulfilled. To say that they were 'fiddling while Rome
burned' is to a great extent true of those of the South African Dutch
who were sincerely desirous that the Transvaal Government should
reform its ways and who were not consciously aiding in the
republicanizing movement; but even of them it is not an adequate
description,--as the answers given to two questioners by the most
prominent and one of the most prominent Bondsmen indicate. Both of
them had in private conversation on different occasions acknowledged
the soundness of the Uitlander cause. To the suggestion, 'Then why
not say so publicly?' the less important of the two replied, 'People
would only say that I am climbing down and ratting on my party.' And
the more important of the two, answering a similar question,