for the mining industry were adversely affected by the government's system of concessions. These included the supply of water to Johannesburg, the manufacture and distribution of liquor and dynamite and the construction of railway lines. Then too the republican machinery of state was primarily geared to meeting the needs of a pastoral-agricultural community and it did not have the skills to administer a rapidly growing industrial state. The time was ripe for rebellion. In Johannesburg a Reform Committee was formed, while Cecil John Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape Colony, arranged for Leander Starr Jameson to invade the republic from the west. The Jameson Raid was a failure and all the culprits were arrested. Rhodes had to resign as prime minister. Afterwards the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, took up the cause of the Uitlanders in their fight for the franchise. He appointed fellow-imperialist, Alfred Milner, as British Commissioner in South Africa. No settlement could be reached and eventually, on 11 October 1899, war broke out between Great Britain and the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. Second Boer War Up to 31 May 1900 Flight By May 1899 it began to look as though war was a real possibility. First to leave were the wives and children of middle and upper-class families. By June white miners joined the flight. Shop assistants and others in the urban economy were notified by their employers that their services would not be required after the end of the month. Between May and mid-October nearly 100,000 white people fled the district. Thus, at the onset of war, there were only about 10,000 whites in the city. The task of transporting this number of people — as well as the more than 100,000 non-whites who left — was an enormous one. At first only third-class passengers were consigned to trucks which normally carried coal, livestock or Africans. By the middle of October even first class passengers were quite happy to travel in coal trucks to the coast. John Sidney Marwick was a civil servant in the employ of the Department of the Secretary for Native Affairs in the colony of Natal. In 1896 he was transferred to Johannesburg and appointed as Native Agent for Zululand. He was only twenty years old. His function was to look after the Zulu men working in the mines on the Witwatersrand. In 1897 alone, 20,615 Zulus from Zululand and Natal had registered