There is something in art and literature which seems to corrupt the ordinary business mind. I think the corrupting influence lies in the extraordinary difference of values, which no ordinary man can foresee or explain. A publisher gets two books, both to his mind fairly well written and interesting; when he publishes them he finds that the worse one catches on and he sells 100,000 copies, whereas the other is a dead loss. He has given, let us say, a hundred pounds for each of them. "A" that he liked best is the failure, and "B" the success. A little later, he gets another book like "B" and finds that it is a complete failure-and so he makes up his mind that the only thing he wants to pay for is eulogy; and he prays for success because he is unable to deserve or merit it, or even to know how it should be gained.
I had one other curious experience with the Saturday Review-I found that a certain number of the best class of business people would only advertise if it had a cover on. The cost of putting a good green cover on it would only be some fifty pounds a week, whereas I could get over two hundred a week for the advertisements. I immediately put the cover on and got the advertisements, thereby improving not only the looks, but the revenue of the Review.
After I had bought the Saturday Review, I went and had a talk with Ochs, and he told me he would help me and outlined the proposition he thought suitable. I should form a company with a capital of about thirty thousand pounds that would take over and own the paper, and this I did, but I put also an addendum to his proposal, constituting five hundred deferred shares that would take no profits, but would control the appointment of the editor and staff. As I held all these five hundred shares myself, I thereby gave myself complete control of the paper. When I asked Albert Ochs for the five thousand pounds that I had to pay for the Saturday Review, he gave me four thousand pounds against shares and thought I ought to find the other thousand easily.
Now, what was the financial position of the Saturday Review when I took it over? The paper was losing money, roughly fifty or sixty pounds a week. Its circulation that once had been thirty or forty thousand had shrunk year by year, till now it was only five or six thousand a week. The income from the sales was less than a hundred pounds a week, and the income from advertisements that had been a thousand pounds a week had diminished to one hundred and fifty pounds or less.
The pay, however, of contributors, had rather increased than diminished, and everyone now expected at least three pounds for writing a column or two. By paying my staff, Shaw, Wells, McColl, Runciman and Chalmers Mitchell much more than the ordinary price, I had further increased my difficulties; but at the same time I knew dozens of young Oxford men at the bar and in journalism who were willing indeed to review books for the Saturday Review for nothing, on condition of getting the books; so instead of my contributors costing me over two hundred pounds a week, I got them down to under a hundred and so turned a loss of fifty or sixty pounds into a profit of thirty or forty pounds. The advertisement revenue I soon increased greatly, as I have told, so that the paper was clearing easily one hundred and fifty pounds a week.
I think I have explained sufficiently the financial position. I had 25,000 shares that I could sell very readily if I wanted money, and I had besides 500 deferred shares that ensured me the continuance of my position.
At this time or a little later I sold 5,000 shares to Beit for cash, and 2,000 or 3,000 more to other people who wanted an oar in the boat, and so made myself secure from the monetary point of view for some years to come.
I had only run the Saturday Review a short time when the Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shocked the world and necessitated on my part a prolonged absence from England.
CHAPTER III
The Jameson raid Rhodes and Chamberlain
Scarcely had I got the Saturday Review and taken the first steps to make it successful when the Jameson Raid took place, nominally in obedience to a call for help and protection from the English women and children in Johannesburg. I knew South Africa too well to be deluded for a moment by this shallow pretext. At once I denounced the raid and everyone who defended it. I soon found its defenders were numerous and could make their voices heard in a hundred journals from The Times down.
I saw Beit about it, and Ochs, Woolfie Joel, too, and others, and came very soon upon the proofs that the raid was instigated by Rhodes for selfish interests and would set South Africa in a blaze.
Information reached me that the raiders had been assembled at Pitsani by Rhodes, and everybody in South Africa knew that their real object was not to succor the Outlanders in Johannesburg, but to overthrow the government in Pretoria.
English opinion on the Jameson Raid and its ignoble end was rather undecided till the German Kaiser sent his famous telegram to Krueger, in which he practically told Krueger that if he wanted help he would give it to him. This inconceivably stupid act not only consolidated English opinion in favor of Jameson, but was the very beginning of that dislike of Germany and condemnation of the German Kaiser which later led to the Great War. Even the British Government resented the insult; it mobilized a part of the fleet and, I believe, called ships away from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. It is not too much to say that the English dislike of the Germans dates from that idiotic telegram.
After the Kaiser's telegram, I saw Arthur Walter, but found him a hot partisan of the Jameson Raiders with ears closed to any reason. At first, as I have told, he didn't like Rhodes, but Moberly Bell soon inoculated him with the pan-English patriotic enthusiasm which suited his innate conservatism.
I had thought that the loss of the American colonies would have taught the English people that interference, even with their own kin thousands of miles away, was ill-advised and apt to be dangerous. But in London in 1895 I found nine men out of ten convinced that it was necessary to "teach the Boers a lesson and put Krueger in his place." That brutal unreason was so wide spread and intense that I resolved to go to South Africa in order the better to combat this old hereditary madness.
It all reminds me that Englishmen have not grown much in one hundred and fifty years. Didn't Benjamin Franklin write to Lord Kames, somewhere about 1760, that "the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of British Empire lie in America, and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are nevertheless, broad and strong to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected"? And it was due to Franklin that at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Guadeloupe was restored to France, while Canada remained with England, though popular English opinion at the time wished rather to retain "the valuable sugar-islands of Guadeloupe" and give Canada to France.
If England had only the sense to profit by Franklin's foresight instead of jeering at him and insulting him, how different the course of world history would have been! As it is, Britain owes her chief possession in North America to his wisdom. In the same way, in 1896,1 found that practically the whole of British opinion, as well in England as in South Africa, was totally and lamentably perverse. I must now return to my own story.
There was no time to lose if I was to do any good, so I took ship at once and was in Cape Town before mid-January, 1896, leaving Runciman in charge of the Saturday Review as my assistant, after having begged him, on any doubtful question, to take counsel with my old friend, the Reverend John Verschoyle.
The first person I wanted to see in South Africa was Jan Hofmeyr, then Rhodes; but curiously enough the day I arrived, Sir James Sivewright came to lunch at the same hotel, and as soon as he heard of me, came up, introduced himself and gave me the benefit of his unrivaled knowledge of South Africa.