rough open windows and
doors, and bespoke great wealth and taste, you must bear in mind would
adorn Birmingham or Manchester. Imagine miles of such houses crowded
with fair occupants and troops of daintily-clad children, their long
hair floating in the wind as they sported in snowy garments on the lawns
and amid the flowers, and then my surprise and something more as I
suddenly came in view of a fort, which the rude Boers have built to
terrorise this community. The superb ridge, which seemed to me with its
beautiful houses and gardens a veritable Paradise after four thousand
miles of travel over treeless plains, and which would certainly be an
ornament to any city on the globe, had in its centre a large and ugly
earthwork, behind which were monstrous Krupp guns to lay waste this
Eden, should the humanity of Johannesburg ever be driven by despair to
strive physically for the rights of freemen. The mere suggestion of it
is brutish, and a Government which can coolly contemplate such a
possibility and frighten timid women and young children with such horrid
prospects, are only fit to be classed with the Herods of the Dark Ages.

THEN AND NOW.

A short drive northward of the suburb placed me in a position to view
the far-reaching desolate wastes of the primitive veld, and to realise
more fully what human intellect, skill, energy, and capital have done on
Hospital Hill and in Johannesburg itself. Twelve years ago there was
not a vestige of life--human or vegetable, except the grass--to be seen
within the entire range of vision from the Hill, and yet the creators of
the remarkable transformation we had just seen were to be threatened
with slaughter and devastation if once they plucked up courage to exact
the rights which every civilised Government would long ago have granted
to them!

JOHANNESBURG AND ITS GREAT INDUSTRY "SUBJECT TO SENILE MADNESS AND
BOORISH INSENSIBILITY."

It were well now, after briefly showing what Johannesburg and its
population is, that the chief of the State and his rustic burghers, in
whose hands lie the future of this remarkable city and its industry,
should be presented to your readers, in order that they might realise
the striking incongruity of first-class mechanical ingenuity, spirited
enterprise, business sagacity, and tireless industry being subject to
senile madness and boorish insensibility. That such a thing should be
is most preposterous and contrary to all human precedent. For
el