to be brothers, but that we by our own act have made them strangers to
the republic?' Such reasonable and liberal sentiments were combated by
members who asserted that the signatures could not belong to law-abiding
citizens, since they were actually agitating against the law of the
franchise, and others whose intolerance was expressed by the defiance of
the member already quoted, who challenged the Uitlanders to come out and
fight. The champions of exclusiveness and racial hatred won the day. The
memorial was rejected by sixteen votes to eight, and the franchise law
was, on the initiative of the President, actually made more stringent
than ever, being framed in such a way that during the fourteen years of
probation the applicant should give up his previous nationality, so that
for that period he would really belong to no country at all. No hopes
were held out that any possible attitude upon the part of the Uitlanders
would soften the determination of the President and his burghers. One
who remonstrated was led outside the State buildings by the President,
who pointed up at the national flag. 'You see that flag?' said he. 'If I
grant the franchise, I may as well pull it down.' His animosity against
the immigrants was bitter. 'Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers,
newcomers, and others,' is the conciliatory opening of one of his public
addresses. Though Johannesburg is only thirty-two miles from Pretoria,
and though the State of which he was the head depended for its revenue
upon the gold fields, he paid it only three visits in nine years.

This settled animosity was deplorable, but not unnatural. A man imbued
with the idea of a chosen people, and unread in any book save the one
which cultivates this very idea, could not be expected to have learned
the historical lessons of the advantages which a State reaps from a
liberal policy. To him it was as if the Ammonites and Moabites had
demanded admission into the twelve tribes. He mistook an agitation
against the exclusive policy of the State for one against the existence
of the State itself. A wide franchise would have made his republic
firm-based and permanent. It was a small minority of the Uitlanders who
had any desire to come into the British system. They were a cosmopolitan
crowd, only united by the bond of a common injustice. But when every
other method had failed, and their petition for the rights of freemen
had been flung back at them, it was natural that their eyes sh