, a member of the Free State Executive and a
convinced nationalist; and it is otherwise remarkable for an estimate
of the economic conditions of the Boers which subsequent experience
has completely justified:

"I most strongly urge you," he writes, "to use your utmost
influence to bear on President Krueger to concede some colourable
measure of reform, not so much in the interests of outsiders as
in those of his own State. Granted that he does nothing. What is
the future? His Boers, the backbone of the country, are perishing
off the land; hundreds have become impoverished loafers, landless
hangers-on of the town population. In his own interests he should
recruit his Republic with new blood--and the sands are running
out. I say this irrespective of agitation about Uitlanders. The
fabric will go to pieces of its own accord unless something is
done.... A moderate franchise reform and municipal privileges
would go far to satisfy any reasonable people, while a
maintenance of the oath ought to be sufficient safeguard against
the swamping of the old population."[66]

[Footnote 66: All these letters are in Cd. 369.]

But the Schreiner Cabinet contained, as we have seen, a representative
of Mr. Hofmeyr in the person of Dr. Te Water. Mr. Merriman could see
that the position in the Transvaal was one that could not go on
indefinitely--that "the fabric would go to pieces of its own accord,
unless something was done." Dr. Te Water was blind even to this aspect
of the question. The correspondence found after the occupation of
Bloemfontein (March 13th, 1900), from which these letters are taken,
contains also certain letters to President Steyn that disclose both
the nature of the Afrikander mediation, as it was understood by the
nationalist leaders of the Cape Colony, and the faithfulness with
which Dr. Te Water served them.

The Te Water correspondence, as we have it,[67] consists of three
letters written respectively on May 8th, 17th, and 27th, from "the
Colonial Secretary's Office, Capetown," to President Steyn. The
replies of the latter have been withheld, not unnaturally, from the
public eye. In the first of these letters Dr. Te Water "hopes
heartily" that Schreiner's "proposition" for the Conference has been
accepted, and then proceeds to impress upon him the advisability of
President Krueger's yielding on the ground, not of justice, but of
temporar