the franchise was
obtainable after one year's residence. President Kruger determined to
serve the Uitlanders, however, as George III.'s Government served the
American Colonists, that is, tax them while refusing them representation
in the control of the taxes. He went on at one and the same time
increasing their burdens monstrously, while he prolonged the period of
residence that qualified for a vote from one year to five, and so on,
till he made it fourteen years--or fourteen times as long as when the
Convention was signed. Nor was this all. He reserved the right
personally to veto any Uitlander being placed on the register even after
the fourteen years if he thought he was for any reason objectionable.
That is, the majority of the taxpayers were disfranchised for ever!
These Uitlanders had bought and paid for 60 per cent. of all the
property in the Transvaal, and 90 per cent. of the taxes were levied
from them; an amount equal to giving every Boer in the country $200 a
year of plunder.

"Is a country that is so governed justly to be called a 'Republic?'

"But even the Boers themselves have been adroitly edged out of power by
Paul Kruger. The Grondwet, or Constitution, provided that to prevent
abuses in legislation, no new law should be passed until the bill for it
had been published three months in advance. To evade this, Kruger passed
all kinds of measures as amendments to existing laws; which, as he
explained, not being new laws, required no notification! Finally,
however, he got the Volksraad to rescind this article of the Grondwet;
and now, as for some time past, any law of any sort can be passed by a
small clique of Kruger's in secret session of the Raad _without notice
of any sort, and without the knowledge or assent of the people_. The
Boers have no more voice in such legislation than if they were Chinese.
The Transvaal is only a Republic in the same sense that a nutshell is a
nut, or a fossil oyster shell is an oyster.

"All that the British Government has ever contended for with President
Kruger has been the fair and honourable observance of his engagement in
respect of equal rights in Article XIV. of the 1884 Convention. This he
has persistently and doggedly refused, while he has been using the
millions of money he has wrung from the Uitlanders to purchase the
material for the war he has been long years preparing on such a colossal
scale to drive the English out of those Colonies in which they have
given