probably almost every American citizen would troop back to her bosom,
and spend not only life, but the wealth he had gained in South Africa
from South African soil, in defending her. Every German would go home
to the Fatherland; every Englishman, every Frenchman, would, as all
brave men in the world’s history have done, when the cry arises, “The
birth-land in danger!” The few Spaniards here trooped back to Spain as
soon as the news of war arrived.
One of the most brilliant and able of English journalists (a man
whose opinion on any subject touching his own land we would receive
almost with the reverence accruing to the man who speaks of a subject
he knows well and has studied with superior abilities; but who had
been only a few months in our land, and, therefore, had not full grasp
of either our people or our problems, which from their complexity
and many-sidedness are subjects for a life’s devotion) that man,
three and a half years ago, when brave little Jameson--brave, however
mistaken--was sent in to capture the mines of Johannesburg for his
master, and when the great mixed population of Johannesburg, Germans
and French, English and Jews, Arabs and Chinamen, refused to arise and
go to aid him, and when hundreds of Englishmen, Cornishmen and others
fled from Johannesburg, fearing that Jameson might arrive and cause a
disturbance--said that Johannesburg would be known forever in history
by the name of _Judasburg!_ and that the Cornish and other Englishmen
who fled from the place were poltroons and cowards. But he was mistaken.