A Traitor in London by Fergus Hume — Read

So Brenda was in London again, and found the great city in an uproar over the possibility of a war in South Africa. Negotiations were constantly passing between England and the Transvaal concerning the franchise for the Uitlanders. History was being manufactured at the rate of a sensation a week; Leyds was weaving his plots and spreading his nets in Europe; while at Pretoria Paul Kruger numbered his burghers, dispensed arms, and intrigued with the President of the Free State. Few believed that a war was inevitable, that a small state of farmers would defy a mighty empire. But there were others who knew from rumors and hints that real strength lay behind the apparent weakness of those two diminutive Republics. Meanwhile zealots like Scarse preached ever the fable of the wolf and the lamb. Chamberlain was the wolf and good Oom Paul the lamb -- somewhat overgrown perhaps, but still a lamb.

A pro-Boer meeting was announced to be held in Trafalgar Square, and Scarse was to speak in favor of the honest, God-fearing agriculturists, who, his imagination led him to believe, inhabited Pretoria. He and his following were dead against the war, and asserted that so many were the people of their opinion that only the big square could hold them. So they rejoiced at the prospect of their convention, which was going to force England into repeating the cowardly policy of the Liberals after Majuba -- a policy miscalled magnanimous, and out of which all these present troubles had arisen. In Amsterdam, astute Dr. Leyds rejoiced also on the assumption that a house divided against itself could not stand. His President had provided him with that text, and the mere fact of this mass meeting seemed to prove the force of it.