hat the
prophet Isaiah said, with a future policy based upon the manufacture of
dynamite in the Transvaal, and the support of the tariffs of the
Netherlands Railway, and the ensuring of a produce market at
Johannesburg by not allowing the people of that city to have electric
trams, the payment of 225,000 pounds a year to keep the forts in order,
and 200,000 pounds interest on the capital expended on the wholly
useless structures, the constant denunciation of the murderer Rhodes,
the squandering of 80,000 pounds a year to spare the Transvaal from
another surprise like the Jameson raid, It appears to the simple
burghers that their President is the only fit man for the office he
holds, and that Kruger is only second to Washington.

And yet both President and people are within reach and close connection
with every possible civilised influence; but the truth is that their
dull, dense, and dark minds are impenetrable to good sense, impervious
to reason, and insensitive to the noble examples we see at Johannesburg.
Though there may be neither rhyme nor reason in anything the
Presidential dotard may say or do, the burgher farmer will cling to him
and make him victor over all rivals for a fourth time.

MY ADVICE TO "THE BRIGHT, CLEVER MEN AT JOHANNESBURG."

This is the wonderful incongruity I spoke of that such a President and
people as above described should be rulers over the enlightened
progressive community of Johannesburg. At a dinner at the Club I
quietly suggested a corrective of this incongruous and unprecedented
condition of things, and said that it lay in the saying: "It was
expedient that one man should die for many." I was conscious of being
stared at, and, indeed, if with all their intellectual capacity the idea
never entered their minds before, I can quite understand their surprise.
But it appears to me that if, according to their own admission, they
have tried everything--pleading, arguments, petitions, resolutions,
menaces, bribery--and all have failed, relief can only come through one
of two things, viz.: Active interference of England, or a determination
on their own part to endure no more. As to the first, every public man
in England knows that the active interference of England in a matter of
this kind is impossible. It may be her moral duty to interfere, but
those bright, clever men at Johannesburg should know as well as we do
that the present age and times will not admit of national action on
grounds