The nearest approach to genuine filibusterism in recent years was the raid of Dr. Jameson and some eight hundred adventurers on the Transvaal, on New Year's Day, 1896. It was badly planned and conducted without any show of skill or courage. The raiders were entrapped and surrendered almost without firing a shot. The Boer authorities, with more magnanimity than wisdom, pardoned the demoralized rank and file, permitted the civilian leaders to go free after a brief imprisonment and the exaction of a fine, and delivered "Dr. Jim" and his military associates over to the English for trial. They were found guilty and subjected to a nominal imprisonment of a few months, as "first-class misdemeanants." Four years later the English forces were in the Boer capital and Dr. Jameson as a member of the Cape Colony parliament, was passing judgment on the Dutch burghers as "rebels" against the British Empire! The career of the Filibuster is no longer open to private individuals. The great powers have monopolized the business, conducting it as such and stripping it of its last poor remnant of romance, without investing it with a scrap of improved morality.
The Filibusters were a virile race, with virtues and vices of generous growth. They played no mean part on the world's stage, albeit a part often wayward and mistaken. They were American dreamers. Had they been Greeks or Norsemen, or free to roam the world in the days of Cortez, Balboa, and Pizarro, victors like them, History would have dealt more kindly by them. As it is, spite of faults and failures, they do not deserve the harshest of all fates, oblivion.
A simple but powerful story of farm life in the great West, which cannot fail to make a lasting impression on every reader. In this book Mr. Harris has done for the wheat fields what Mr. Westcott has done for rural New York and Mr. Bacheller for the North country. It is in no way imitative of _David Harum_ or _Eben Holden_; and, unlike each of these books, it is not in the portrayal of a single quaint character that its power consists. Mr. Harris has taken for his story a typical Iowa farmer's family and their neighbours; and, although every one of the characters is realistically portrayed, the sense of proportion is never lost sight of, and the result is a picture of real life, artistic in the highest sense, as being true to nature. It is a wholesome story, full of the real heroism of homely life, a book to make the reader better by strengthening his belief in the truth of self-sacrifice and the survival of sturdy American character.