to the annexation--Internal
troubles--Divisions amongst the Boers--Hopeless condition of the
country._

In or about the year 1872, the burghers of the Republic elected Mr.
Burgers their President. This remarkable man was a native of the Cape
Colony, and passed the first sixteen or seventeen years of his life,
he once informed me, on a farm herding sheep. He afterwards became
a clergyman noted for the eloquence of his preaching, but his ideas
proving too broad for his congregation, he resigned his cure, and in an
evil moment for himself took to politics.

President Burgers was a man of striking presence and striking talents,
especially as regards his oratory, which was really of a very high
class, and would have commanded attention in our own House of Commons.
He possessed, however, a mind of that peculiarly volatile order, that is
sometimes met with in conjunction with great talents, and which seems to
be entirely without ballast. His intellect was of a balloon-like nature,
and as incapable of being steered. He was always soaring in the clouds,
and, as is natural to one in that elevated position, taking a very
different and more sanguine view of affairs to that which men of a more
lowly, and perhaps a more practical, turn of mind would do.

But notwithstanding his fly-away ideas, President Burgers was
undoubtedly a true patriot, labouring night and day for the welfare of
the state of which he had to undertake the guidance: but his patriotism
was too exalted for his surroundings. He wished to elevate to the rank
of a nation a people who had not got the desire to be elevated; with
this view he contracted railway loans, made wars, minted gold, &c., and
then suddenly discovered that the country refused to support him. In
short, he was made of a very different clay to that of the people he had
to do with. He dreamt of a great Dutch Republic "with eight millions of
inhabitants," doing a vast trade with the interior through the Delagoa
Bay Railway. They, on the other hand, cared nothing about republics or
railways, but fixed their affections on forced labour and getting rid of
the necessity of paying taxes--and so between them the Republic came
to grief. But it must be borne in mind that President Burgers was
throughout actuated by good motives; he did his best by a stubborn and
stiff-necked people; and if he failed, as fail he did, it was more their
fault than his. As regards the pension he received from the English
Gover