would be to spoil the old bread; to give unto all men the
rights of men would be to swamp for ever the party which is to him
greater than the State. When one thinks of the one-century history of
this people, much is seen that accounts for their extraordinary love of
isolation, and their ingrained and passionate aversion to control; much,
too, that draws to them a world of sympathy. And when one realises the
old Dopper President hemmed in once more by the hurrying tide of
civilisation, from which his people have fled for generations--trying to
fight both Fate and Nature, standing up to stem a tide as resistless as
the eternal sea--one sees the pathos of the picture. But this is as
another generation may see it. To-day we are too close, so close that
the meaner details, the blots and flaws, are all most plainly visible:
the corruption, the insincerity, the injustice, the barbarity--all the
unlovely touches that will by-and-by be forgotten, sponged away by the
gentle hand of Time, when only the picturesque will remain."

[Illustration: PAUL KRUGER,

President of the Transvaal Republic.

Photo by Elliott & Fry, London.]

Mr. Fitzpatrick speaks somewhat more plainly in another place:--

"Outside the Transvaal Mr. Kruger has the reputation of being free
from taint of corruption from which so many of his colleagues
suffer. Yet within the Republic and among his own people one of the
gravest of the charges levelled against him is, that by his example
and connivance he has made himself responsible for much of the
plundering that goes on. There are numbers of cases in which the
President's nearest relations have been proved to be concerned in
the most flagrant jobs, only to be screened by his influence;
such cases, for instance, as that of the Vaal River Water Supply
Concession, in which Mr. Kruger's son-in-law 'hawked' about for the
highest bid the vote of the Executive Council on a matter which had
not yet come before it, and, moreover, sold and duly delivered the
aforesaid vote. There is the famous libel case in which Mr. Eugene
Marais, the editor of the Dutch paper _Land en Volk_, successfully
sustained his allegation that the President had defrauded the State
by charging heavy travelling expenses for a certain trip on which he
was actually the guest of the Cape Colonial Government."

The light thus thrown on the dealings of Mr. Kruger is not a
solitary gleam. It may be remembered that during the period of
British rule