hich Mr. Kruger has since followed:
the policy of trying to sit on either side of the fence. Mr. Kruger
has struggled more and more violently to accomplish this feat as the
years advance and he advances in years. He has tried to grab the
advantages attendant upon the possession of gold mines and schemed
to acquire a great financial status, and yet at the same time to
keep up his affectation of piety and to maintain his pristine
condition of bucolic irresponsibility. Brought face to face with Sir
T. Shepstone's scheme for annexation, Mr. Burger privately
encouraged the proposed action of the Government--he and his
colleagues even stipulating for pension and office--while publicly
he lifted up his protest against the innovation.

The Boer, with his usual craft, had decided that the British
Government should set him financially on his feet, which feet he
meant promptly to use for running away from his responsibilities.
Some declare that the policy of Sir T. Shepstone was premature, that
he should have waited until the Boer had soaked further in the
slough of insolvency into which he was fast sinking. But Sekukuni
was threatening, and on the south-eastern frontier Cetchwayo, with a
force some thirty thousand strong, was waiting his opportunity. The
promise of the future was a general holocaust, in which Boer men,
women, and children, farms and flocks would be annihilated. Sir T.
Shepstone, had he been other than a Briton, might have stayed his
hand and waited till the Boers were effectually swept away, but
being a Briton he acted as such, doubtless arguing that,

"As we under Heaven are supreme head,
So, under him, that great supremacy,
Where we do reign, we will alone uphold."

THE WEB THICKENING

It must be remembered that between the Zulus and the Boers no
boundary line had ever been fixed, and that for over a dozen years
the Zulu chiefs had repeatedly implored the British Governor in
Natal for advice and help in their dealings with these aggressors.
It had been part of the Dutch policy--if policy it may be called--to
force the Zulu gradually to edge further and further from the rich
pasture lands sloping eastward of the Drakensberg Mountains, and
spreading to right and left into the north and west of Zululand.
Little notice had been taken of their petitions, and the Zulus had
determined to take the law into their own hands. Cetchwayo,
therefore, when the news of our annexation of the Transvaal reache