I told about the interview in its main lines in the Saturday Review at that time, and gave the best portrait I could of the village Cromwell called Paul Krueger. Every one is familiar with his likeness to a great gorilla, his porky baboon face, and small piggy grey eyes, but no portrait could give an impression of the massive strength, the power, and restrained passion of the man. He must have been fifty-four inches round the chest, and when seated looked like a Hercules. The worst fault in his gigantic figure was the shortness of his legs. Strange to say, he is one of the few men who has grown greater in my memory, and this in spite of all the rumblings and failings of his later years. Had he been trained, had he had any education or reading, Paul Krueger would have been one of the greatest of men. As it was, he was one of the most remarkable.
Krueger was suspicious, as the ignorant always are, self-centered like most strong-willed, successful men, but not devoid of heart and conscience. His treatment of the Outlanders in Johannesburg was simply insane. Some eighty thousand of them had made Johannesburg the greatest gold-mining industry in the world; they paid more than nine-tenths of the state taxes.
Instead of getting just enough to live on-a few hundreds a year-from his twenty thousand Boer burghers, Krueger was now a rich man. The Outlanders had turned the Transvaal from a bankrupt state into the wealthiest in South Africa, with a revenue of three millions sterling a year: yet in 1894 he had made it impossible for them to obtain a vote in a country to which they contributed practically the whole revenue. They had no control even over the affairs of the city they had founded and built up.
Krueger still treated Johannesburg as a mining camp under his own mining commissioner.
Dutch was taught in the schools, and not English. Though denied all rights of citizenship and treated as aliens, the Outlanders were nevertheless liable to be impressed for service in native wars. Krueger's iniquities were surely unparalleled. He had given foreigners a concession for the manufacture of dynamite, which was imported into the country by monopolists, and sold at such a price to the mines that it practically imposed a tax of half a million pounds a year on the industry. Another lot of adventurers got the concession for carrying coal along the Rand, which they did at the highest possible rate; another group owned a liquor concession which corrupted the natives.
The curious thing was that Krueger's treatment of the Outlanders was no worse than his treatment of the Boers in the Cape. He wouldn't allow the Transvaal to enter the Customs Union; and pigs, cattle, and coal from the Cape could be imported only on payment of fantastic duties. The spirit of his policy was shown in one act. When the Transvaal railway management proposed to put up the rate from the Vaal above six-pence a ton in order to kill the Cape traffic, Krueger asked them to make it a shilling; and when the traders left the railway at the Free State border and carried their goods over the short stretch to Johannesburg in bullock-wagons, Krueger proclaimed that the Vaal Drifts, which they had to cross, would be closed to them.
This last piece of despotism brought a new force into the field. In 1895 Joseph Chamberlain had made himself the Minister of the Colonies; and although he had no liking for Rhodes, still, when Rhodes appealed to him, he took his view and described President Krueger's act about the Drifts as one "almost of hostility," and declared his willingness to back up his protest by force.
Reluctantly, Krueger saw he had gone too far and threw open the Drifts.
Then the raid took place, which blotted out even the memory of most of the President's stupidities and threw the onus of flagrant wrong doing upon Rhodes.
Early in the interview Krueger asked me point blank whether I believed, like Hercules Robinson, that Chamberlain didn't know about the raid. I said, "I couldn't telclass="underline" there was no proof. I felt certain the Cabinet didn't know it, and could hardly believe that Mr. Chamberlain would act as dictator in such a matter."
"The Cabinet didn't know of it?" questioned Krueger. "You are sure?" "As sure as I can be of such a thing," I replied.
In the back of my mind was the feeling that Chamberlain must have known all about it, may have talked even to Mr. Balfour about it, but I wanted to say rather less than more of what I believed out of patriotic feeling, and so I maintained the possibility of Chamberlain's innocence. Krueger turned on me sharply.
"You know that Rhodes planned it, paid for it, directed it?" he barked.
"Surely," I replied. "He confessed as much in Cape Town to Jan Hofmeyr, and I have wired that home to my paper."
"So," he cried, "you admit that Rhodes was a scoundrel?" "Worse," I replied quietly, "a blundering idiot, to think that five hundred men could beat the Boers."
The great burly man sprang erect, while his little grey eyes snapped in the fat pork face. He looked like a maddened baboon.
"Four hundred boys," he shouted. "Do you know what I would have done with them?"
"No," I said smiling, "I should like to know."
"What I proposed in council," he roared, glaring at me, "was to lead each by the ear to the border and kick their bottoms back into Bechuana-land."
"Why didn't you do it?" I cried, shouting with laughter. "Oh, my goodness!
What a pity you didn't do it and enrich history with a unique scene. The most genial proposal I ever heard. That is what ought to have been done with them: impudence should always be met with contempt."
My delighted acceptance of his proposal brought the old man to good humor at once, but he was still suspicious.
"Do you know," he went on, "that one of Jameson's lieutenants, a leader of the raid, an officer in your army, too, told the Bechuanaland police that the raid was looked upon favorably by the government?"
"But the police," I said, "didn't believe him. If the police had come in as raiders, then the complicity of the government would be difficult to deny."
"Hercules Robinson is honest," said Krueger, as if to himself, "good, too, but getting old and weak: thinks it clever to speak with two tongues. But we shall soon know."
"Know what?" I asked.
"Know whether your government, whether Chamberlain and Rhodes were agreed."
"How will time help you?" I asked, wondering.
The old man went into a long explanation which the Chief Justice translated, telling me that notebooks, and telegrams had been found upon the battlefield, and that they had all been decoded, and established the complicity of Rhodes and Beit in the raid up to the hilt. I was told I might go and see the telegrams, and I did see them all the next day, some time early in February, the same telegrams that were published in The Times in May, and caused a sensation.
But Krueger was not to be diverted for long from the main point.
"We shall soon know," he repeated, "whether Chamberlain was behind Rhodes or not."
"How?" I asked.
"Well," he said, "it is clear that the English people were behind him. Look how they cheer the raiders, and how they talk of them as heroes. But if they punish them that will be clear, and if they punish Rhodes, then I shall know that Chamberlain and the government were not behind him."
There was such menace in the old man's voice and manner, such rage of anger, that I tried to show him the other side.
"Difficult," I said "to punish Rhodes. How would you have him punished?"
"Oh," he cried, "I don't want him punished in money or in person. He was made a Privy Councillor. Let them take that away from him: anything to show their disapproval, and I shall be content. I want to believe that the English government is honest, as it was when Gladstone was there."
I could not help but admit that that might be done, should be done.
"If it is not done," cried the old man, "I shall know what to do."