advocates' affected faith in their clients' cause. Thus England was
decoyed into a protracted tournament of words and phrases without any
practical result, but gratifying and inspiring no doubt to certain
well-paid _soi-disant_ champions of the principle defined as the
"_perfection of justice_," who revel in a display of forensic erudition,
which, however, only illustrates to the unedified lay mind how speech is
adaptable to veil inward conviction, and how a mass of rhetoric can be
employed to justify the breach of simple and well-understood
engagements.

It continues to be clumsily insisted upon in official and paid Press
organs how the need of providing Transvaal armaments became realized
only with that Anglo-capitalistic plot of 1895-96 against Boer
independence, and that, in fact, Dr. Jameson was worthy of the Boer
nation's lasting gratitude for opening their eyes to their helplessly
unarmed and unprepared condition up to that time. In those papers it is
declared with unblushing inexactness how the Transvaal at that epoch
possessed only two hundred and fifty inefficient and ill-equipped
artillerists, with only a few cannons of various antiquated types, and
how the burgher element had, up to that time, continued unarmed and in
unsuspecting insecurity. To stamp these misstatements as false, it needs
only to be considered that from the time of the Boer trek in 1835-38
every Boer had been a hunter and guerilla soldier possessed of the best
firearms then extant, ready at any sacrifice to provide still more
effective weapons as inventions in arms of precision in turn progressed.
His passion to be well armed only equalled that of his love for land.
From 1881 every Transvaal and Orange Free State Boer without exception
had, and was obliged to have, his Martini-Henry rifle. The Government
arsenals were supplied with reserves of that up to recently unsurpassed
weapon and with large stores of ammunition. The authorities supplied