so wise as Mr. Fitzpatrick. When Sir John
Willoughby in 1897 attacked the Reform Leaders of Johannesburg in
the _Nineteenth Century_, Mr. Phillips replied to it in the same
Review, August 1897, defending himself and his comrades from the
charges made. In consequence of this action Mr. Phillips was
considered to have broken his pledge and was condemned by the
Transvaal Government to banishment. Doubtless it was without much
regret that he shook the dust of that ill-conditioned State from off
his shoes.

THE ULTIMATUM

After the turmoil of 1896 affairs declined from bad to worse. The
state of tension between the oppressed Uitlanders and the now
suspicious Boers became from day to day and year to year more acute,
till at last it was almost unbearable. The incompetence of the
police showed that robbery, and even murder, might at any moment be
perpetrated and go unpunished, and alarm on this score was not
allayed by the action of a constable in shooting dead a Uitlander
named Edgar for having met his insults with a blow.

To thoroughly appreciate the misery and insecurity of the
Uitlanders, the atrocity of the Government, and the uncloaked
hostility to Great Britain that has existed till now, we may quote a
description of the situation given last year by Professor James
Liebmann. He wrote:--

"In the Transvaal a state of things reigns supreme which cannot be
surpassed by the most corrupt of South American Republics. There the
Boer shows his character in its most unpleasant features. Low,
sordid, corrupt, his chief magistrate as well as his lowest official
readily listens to 'reasons that jingle,' and, like the gentleman in
the 'Mikado,' is not averse to 'insults.' He calls his country a
republic--it is so in name only. The majority of the population,
representing the wealth and intelligence of the country--the
Uitlanders--are refused almost every civil right, except the
privilege of paying exorbitant taxes to swell an already overgorged
treasury. Under this ideal(?) government, which is really a
sixteenth-century oligarchy flourishing at the end of the
nineteenth, and is, certainly not a land where

'A man may speak the thing he will,'

you have a press censorship as tyrannical as in Russia, a State
supervision of telegrams, a veto on the right of public meeting, a
most unjust education law, and an Executive browbeating the
Justiciary; and, in order to accomplish so much, the Transvaal has
closed its doors to