The secret conspiracy of the Capitalists and Jingoes to overthrow
the South African Republic began now to gain ground with great
rapidity, for just at this critical period Mr. Chamberlain became
Secretary of State for the Colonies. In the secret correspondence
of the conspirators, reference is continually made to the
Colonial Office in a manner which, taken in connection with later
revelations and with a successful suppression of the truth, has
deepened the impression over the whole world that the Colonial
Office was privy to, if not an accomplice in, the villainous
attack on the South African Republic.

Nor has the world forgotten how, at the urgent instance of the
Africander party in the Cape Colony, an investigation into the
causes of the conflict was held in Westminster; how that
investigation degenerated into a low attack upon the Government
of the deeply maligned and deeply injured South African Republic,
and how at the last moment, when the truth was on the point of
being revealed, and the conspiracy traced to its fountain head in
the British Cabinet, the Commission decided all of a sudden not
to make certain compromising documents public.

Here we see to what a depth the old great traditions of British
Constitutionalism had sunk under the influence of the
ever-increasing and all-absorbing lust of gold, and in the hands
of a sharp-witted wholesale dealer, who, like Cleon of old, has
constituted himself a statesman.

When Mr. Reitz wrote his book he did not know that immediately after the
Raid the British Government began to accumulate information, and to