another chance, which is at least some small compensation for
all the cost and complicated consequences of this wanton war.

[Sidenote: _Ex-President Steyn_.]

Martinus Theunis Steyn, late President of what was once the Orange
Free State, is in almost all respects a marked contrast to the
Transvaal President, whose folly he abetted and whose flight for a
while he shared. Steyn, speaking broadly, is almost young enough to be
Kruger's grandson, and was never, as Kruger was from his birth, a
British subject, for he was born at Wynburg some few years after the
Orange Free State received its independence. Whilst Kruger was never
for a single hour under the schoolmaster's rod, and is laughingly said
even now to be unable to read anything which he has not first
committed to memory, Steyn is a man of considerable culture, having
been trained in England as a barrister, and having practised at the
bar in Bloemfontein for six years before he became President. He
therefore could not plead ignorance as his excuse when he flung his
ultimatum in the face of Great Britain and Ireland. Whilst Kruger was
a man of war from his youth, a "strong, unscrupulous, grim, determined
man," Steyn never saw a shot fired in his life except in sport till
this war began, yet all strangely it was the fighting President who
fled from the face of the Guards, with all their multitudinous
comrades in arms, and never rested till the sea removed him beyond
their reach, while the lawyerly President, the man of peace, doubled
back on his pursuers, returned by rugged by-paths to the land he had
ruined, and there in association with De Wet became even more a
fugitive than ancient Cain or the men of Adullam's cave.

That many of his own people hotly disapproved of the course their
infatuated ruler took is common knowledge; but by no one has that fact
been more powerfully emphasised than by Paul Botha in his famous book
"From Boer to Boer." Rightly or wrongly, this is what, briefly put,
Botha says:--

[Sidenote: _Paul Botha's opinion of this Ex-President._]

When as a Free Stater I think of the war and realise that we have
lost the independence of our little state, I feel that I could
curse Martinus Theunis Steyn who used his country as a stepping
stone for the furtherance of his own private ends. He sold his
country to the Transvaal in the hope that Paul Kruger's mantle
would fall on him. The first time Kruger visited the Orange