Sir John Brand, the President of the Orange Free State,
died last Saturday. His death is a calamity to the State of which he was a wise and thoroughly high-minded ruler, and a misfortune for this country, to whose policy he was always friendly. He had been, indeed, a member of the English bar, and accepted a knighthood from the Queen as a recognition of his cordial feeling towards her. It was his -Influence chiefly which kept the Orange Free State from coalescing with the Transvaal, and accepting the general policy of President Kriiger, which was, of course, hostile to this country both commercially and politically. And yet he was a genuine patriot, and never subordinated the welfare of the Republic he ruled to his sympathy for any other people or Government. It. is now twenty- five years since he was elected to the Presidency of the Orange Free State. It will be a difficult task to find a suc- cessor as wise and as upright, and impossible to find at pre- sent one anything like as influential. He took a D.C.L. at the University of Leyden, and before his election to the Presidency of the Orange Free State in 1863, had been Professor of Law in the South African University ; so that he was a sound jurist as well as a most temperate politician.
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