per is signed by nine
clergymen of the Dutch Reformed Church, and includes the name of the
Rev. Andrew Murray, a name respected and beloved by many in our own
country. It is welcome news that such good work has been undertaken,
that the President has himself encouraged it, and that a number of Zulus
or Kaffirs have recently been baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church of
the Transvaal. But the fact strikes one painfully that in this pleading,
(which has a pathetic note in it,) these clergymen appear to have
obliterated from their mind and memory the whole past history, of their
nation, and to have forgotten that the harvest from seed sown through
many generations may spring up and bear its bitter fruit in their own
day. They do not seem to have accepted the verdict, or made the
confession, "we and our fathers have sinned." They seem rather to argue,
"our fathers may have sinned in these respects, but it cannot be laid to
our charge that we are continuing in their steps."

No late repentance will avail for the salvation of their country unless
Justice is now proclaimed and practised;--Justice in Government and in
the Laws.

Their Grondwet, or Constitution, must be removed out of its place for
ever; their unequal laws, and the administrative corruption which
unequal laws inevitably foster, must be swept away, and be replaced by a
very different Constitution and very different Laws. If this had been
done during the two last decades of Transvaal history, while
untrammelled (as was desired) by British interference, the sincerity of
this recent utterance would have deserved full credit, and would have
been recognized as the beginning of a radical reformation.

The following is from the last Report of the Aborigines Protection
Society (Jan., 1900). Its present secretary leans towards a favourable
judgment of the recent improvements in the policy of the Transvaal, and
condemns severely every act on the part of the English which does not
accord with the principles of our Constitutional Law, and therefore this
statement will not be regarded as the statement of a partisan: "It is
laid down as a fundamental principle in the Transvaal Grondwet that
there is no equality of rights between white men and blacks. In theory,
if not in practice, the Boers regard the natives, all of whom they
contemptuously call Kaffirs, whatever their tribal differences, pretty
much as the ancient Jews regarded the Philistines and others whom they
expelle