ate, or as a
Flexible constitution, alterable by the ordinary legislative machinery.
Further examination of the matter has confirmed me in the view there
suggested, that the constitution belongs to the latter category.]

[Footnote 82: Copies of the letters written by Mr. Lionel Phillips were
seized after the rising and published by the Boer Government.]

[Footnote 83: There were some 700,000 Kafirs in the Transvaal, but no
one reckoned them as possible factors in a contest, any more than sheep
or oxen.]

[Footnote 84: This operatic element appeared in the rising itself, when
a fire-escape, skilfully disguised to resemble a Maxim gun, was moved
backward and forward across the stage at Johannesburg for the purpose of
frightening the Boers at a distance.]

[Footnote 85: It is hardly necessary to point out the absurdity of the
suggestion that the Company intended to seize the Transvaal for itself.
The Company could no more have taken the Transvaal than it could have
taken Natal. It was for self-government that the insurgent-Uitlanders
were to rise, and they would have objected to be governed by the Company
at least as much as they objected to be governed by the Boers. Such
individual members of the Company as held Rand mining shares would have
profited by the better administration of the country under a reformed
Government, but they would have profited in exactly the same way as
shareholders in Paris or Amsterdam. This point, obvious enough to any
one who knows South Africa, is clearly put by M. Mermeix, in his
interesting little book, _La Revolution de Johannesburg_. Other fanciful
hypotheses have been put forward, which it seems needless to notice.]

[Footnote 86: Much controversy has arisen as to the promise which the
Boer commandant made, when the police force surrendered, that the lives
of its leaders should be spared. Whatever might have happened
immediately after the surrender, they would in any case not have been
put to death in cold blood at Pretoria, for that would have been a
blunder, which a man so astute and so far from cruel as the President
would not have committed.]

[Footnote 87: When a conspiracy succeeds, the chief conspirator is
usually some one already wielding some civil or military power, as Louis
Napoleon did when he overcame the French Assembly in 1851.]

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ECONOMIC FUTURE OF SOUTH AFRICA

Though I do not attempt to present in this book an account of the
agricultur