ry, be it remembered, as
large as Great Britain. Pretoria and the lonely country to the north,
east, and west[63] have the rest of the population and all the power. It
is true that Pretoria has also a good deal of the intelligence. But this
intelligence is frequently dissociated from political rights.

President Kruger lives in a house which the Republic has presented to
him, five minutes' walk from the public offices. It is a long, low
cottage, like an Indian bungalow, with nothing to distinguish it from
other dwellings. The President has, however, a salary of L7,000 a year,
besides an allowance, commonly called "coffee money," to enable him to
defray the expenses of hospitality. Just opposite stands the little
chapel of the so-called Dopper sect in which he occasionally preaches.
Like the Scotch of former days, the Boers have generally taken more
interest in ecclesiastical than in secular politics. A sharp contest has
raged among them between the party which desires to be in full communion
with the Dutch Reformed Church of Cape Colony and the party which
prefers isolation, distrusting (it would seem unjustly) the strict
orthodoxy of that church. The Doppers (dippers, _i.e._ Baptists) are
still more stringent in their adherence to ancient ways. When I asked
for an account of their tenets, I was told that they wore long
waistcoats and refused to sing hymns. They are, in fact, old-fashioned
Puritans in dogmatic beliefs and social usages, and, as in the case of
the more extreme Puritans of the seventeenth century, this theological
stringency is accompanied by a firmness of character which has given
them a power disproportionate to their numbers.

Quiet as Pretoria is, the echoes of the noisy Rand are heard in it, and
the Rand questions occupy men's minds. But outside Pretoria the country
is lonely and silent, like all other parts of the Transvaal, except the
mining districts. Here and there, at long, intervals, you come upon a
cluster of houses--one can hardly call them villages. If it were not for
the mines, there would not be one white man to a square mile over the
whole Republic.

[Footnote 59: Mr. J. Hays Hammond, the eminent mining engineer, in
_North American Review_ for February, 1897.]

[Footnote 60: The total output of the Californian gold deposits up to
the end of 1896 was L256,000,000. The total gold output of the Transvaal
was in 1898 $78,070,761 (about L16,000,000), that of the United States
$65,082,430.