hrough every transaction of life. These are the
wrongs which Mr. W. T. Stead has described as 'the twopenny-halfpenny
grievances of a handful of Englishmen.'

The manner in which the blood was sucked from the Uitlanders, and the
rapid spread of wealth among the Boer officials, may be gathered from
the list of the salaries of the State servants from the opening of the
mines to the outbreak of the war:

L
1886 51,831
1887 99,083
1888 164,466
1889 249,641
1890 324,520
1891 332,888
1892 323,608
1893 361,275
1894 419,775
1895 570,047
1896 813,029
1897 996,959
1898 1,080,382
1899 1,216,394

which shows, as Mr. FitzPatrick has pointed out, that the salary list
had become twenty-four times what it was when the Uitlanders arrived,
and five times as much as the total revenue was then.

But outside and beyond all the definite wrongs from which they suffered,
there was a constant irritation to freeborn and progressive men,
accustomed to liberal institutions, that they should be despotically
ruled by a body of men some of whom were ignorant bigots, some of them
buffoons, and nearly all of them openly and shamelessly corrupt. Out of
twenty-five members of the First Volksraad twenty-one were, in the case
of the Selati Railway Company, publicly and circumstantially accused of
bribery, with full details of the bribes received, their date, and who
paid them. The black-list includes the present vice-president, Schalk
Burger; the vice-president of that date; Eloff, the son-in-law of
Kruger; and the secretary of the Volksraad. Apparently every man of the
executive and the legislature had his price.

A corrupt assembly is an evil master, but when it is narrow-minded and
bigoted as well, it becomes indeed intolerable. The following tit-bits
from the debates in the two Raads show the intelligence and spirit of
the men who were ruling over one of the most progressive communities in
the world:

'Pillar-boxes in Pretoria were opposed on the grounds that they were
extravagant and effeminate. Deputy Taljaard said that he could not see
why people wanted to be always writing letters; he wrote none himself.
In the days of his youth he had written a letter and had not been afraid
to travel fifty miles and more