“A Boer Machiavelli.”

One who knows anything of the conditions under which the Johannesburgers live need not come to Pretoria to know how hollow and insincere these and countless other professions are; but when read at Pretoria with those four forts constructed at lavish expense commanding the approaches to the capital from the Johannesburg direction, the mendacity of the writer seems appalling. Take these in conjunction with the many promises President Kruger has uttered to interviewers, to casual English visitors, to deputations or in public speeches, in relation to his intentions to adhere strictly to the terms of the Convention of 1884, and one cannot but conclude that, though the President reads the Bible daily, he must have overlooked the sentences that apply to liars. If, despite the cordiality, conciliatoriness, and numerous expressions of goodwill, that are visible in Mr Chamberlain’s despatches, and the entreaties, remonstrances, and the continual patient efforts of the uitlanders to soften the asperities of Boer rule, President Kruger and his burghers, while writing in the style of the above quotations, build these great forts at Pretoria and Johannesburg, it is evident that English people have wholly failed to understand this man, and that their ideal of a “goodish sort of man, kindly and a little old-fashioned, a little slow perhaps, and stubborn after the Dutch type,” never existed since Pretoria was founded. On the contrary, the real Kruger is a Boer Machiavelli, astute and bigoted, obstinate as a mule, and remarkably opinionated, vain and puffed up with the power conferred on him, vindictive, covetous and always a Boer, which means a narrow-minded and obtuse provincial of the illiterate type.