ringent than ever, being framed in such a way that
during the fourteen years of probation the applicant should give up his
previous nationality, so that for that period he would belong to no
country at all. No hopes were held out that any possible attitude upon
the part of the Uitlanders would soften the determination of the
President and his burghers. One who remonstrated was led outside the
State buildings by the President, who pointed up at the national flag.
'You see that flag?' said he. 'If I grant the franchise, I may as well
pull it down.' His animosity against the immigrants was bitter.
'Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers, new-comers, and others,' is the
conciliatory opening of one of his public addresses. Though Johannesburg
is only thirty-two miles from Pretoria, and though the State of which he
was the head depended for its revenue upon the goldfields, he paid it
only three visits in nine years.

This settled animosity was deplorable, but not unnatural. A man imbued
with the idea of a chosen people, and unread in any book save the one
which cultivates this very idea, could not be expected to have learned
the historical lessons of the advantages which a State reaps from a
liberal policy. To him it was as if the Ammonites and Moabites had
demanded admission into the twelve tribes. He mistook an agitation
against the exclusive policy of the State for one against the existence
of the State itself. A wide franchise would have made his republic
firm-based and permanent. It was a minority of the Uitlanders who had
any desire to come into the British system. They were a cosmopolitan
crowd, only united by the bond of a common injustice. The majority of
the British immigrants had no desire to subvert the State. But when
every other method had failed, and their petition for the rights of
freemen had been flung back at them, it was natural that their eyes
should turn to that flag which waved to the north, the west, and the
south of them--the flag which means purity of government with equal
rights and equal duties for all men. Constitutional agitation was laid
aside, arms were smuggled in, and everything prepared for an organised
rising.

It had been arranged that the town was to rise upon a certain night,
that Pretoria should be attacked, the fort seized, and the rifles and
ammunition, used to arm the Uitlanders. It was a feasible device, though
it must seem to us, who have had such an experience of the military
vir