maintained. When I was there, a bout of
fisticuffs occurred between the ex-head of the town police and his
recently appointed successor, and the prowess of the former delighted a
large ring of English spectators who gathered round the combatants. But
one hears of no shootings at-sight or lynchings; and considering the
great number of bad characters who congregate at places of this kind, it
was surprising that the excess of crime over other South African towns
(in which there is very little crime among the whites) should not have
been larger. Partly, perhaps, because the country is far from Europe,
the element of mere roughs and rowdies, of scalawags, hoodlums, and
larrikins, is smaller than in the mining districts of the Western United
States, and the proportion of educated men unusually large. The best
society of the place--of course not very numerous--is cultivated and
agreeable. It consists of men of English or Anglo-Jewish race--including
Cape Colonists and Americans, with a few Germans, mostly of Jewish
origin. I should conjecture the English and colonial element to compose
seven-tenths of the white population, the American and German about
one-tenth each, while Frenchmen and other European nations make up the
residue. There are hardly any Boers or Hollanders, except Government
officials; and one feels one's self all the time in an English, that is
to say, an Anglo-Semitic town. Though there are some 50,000 Kafirs, not
many are to be seen about the streets. The Boer farmers of the
neighbourhood drive their waggons in every morning, laden with
vegetables. But there are so few of the native citizens of the South
African Republic resident in this its largest town that the traveller
cannot help fancying himself in the Colony; and it was only natural that
the English-speaking people, although newcomers, should feel the place
to be virtually their own.

Great is the change when one passes from the busy Johannesburg to the
sleepy Pretoria, the political capital of the country, laid out
forty-three years ago, and made the seat of government in 1863. The
little town--it has about 12,000 inhabitants, two-thirds of whom are
whites--lies in a warm and well watered valley--about thirty miles
N.N.E. of Johannesburg. The gum-trees and willows that have grown up
swiftly in the gardens and along the avenues embower it; and the views
over the valley from the low hills--most of them now (since the middle
of 1896) crowned by batterie