BOOKS.

PAUL KRUGER.*

IN 1898, when noticing Mr. Statham's Paul Kruger, we remarked that the President was not likely to write his own Memoirs. We could not foresee that he would settle down in Europe, and make a determined and systematic appeal to Anglophobes in the British Islands and elsewhere. The two large and handsome volumes published by Mr. Unwin will, as a matter of fact, greatly disappoint those who hoped for a revelation either of diplomatic secrets or of personal character. The ex-President's eye is upon public opinion of to-day rather than upon posterity, and, for the rest, men trained in the school of the veld are not introspective. However, some of the speeches and addresses published in an appendix are really valuable documents, illustrating the temper, the beliefs, the methods, of a man who has ruled his people with extraordinary skill, and whose name would, had the Boers lived in isolation, have gone down to history as that of a supremely successful patriarchal autocrat. As things are, there is obvious pathos in the position of the defeated exile who still rebels against the despotism of facts, still appeals to the shallow senti- mentalism of peoples that will applaud him and refuse to help him, still trusts (we believe trusts sincerely) that the God who led the Boers like the Israelites through the desert, delivering them from perils of wild beasts and savage tribes, will in His own good time restore the fallen cause.

These Memoirs were dictated by Mr. Krilger to his private secretary, Mr. Bredell, and to Mr. Piet Grobler, who handed their notes to the Rev. Dr. Schowalter. The last cross- questioned the ex-President upon points that required further elucidation. The result has been excellently rendered into English by Mr. Teixeira de Mattos. But the multiplicity of hands has taken the story very far away from the Taal in which it was spoken, and, as in the case of the Amir Abdur- rahman's Memoirs, we are puzzled as to how much exactly of the author remains. The numerous editorial notes make several statements for which we should be glad to have exact references, and our confidence in the editorial knowledge is shaken when we find the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 (signed by Sir George Clerk) ascribed to Messrs. Owen and Hogg, the signatories of the earlier Sand River Convention. But then Mr. Kruger himself is made (p. 129) to describe Sir Theophilus Shepstone as Governor of Natal!

Paul Kruger, as we all know, was a British subject by birth,—a misfortune that perhaps is too common to deserve notice. As a child he accompanied his parents on one of the minor northward treks preceding the " Great Trek " of 1836. It is interesting to see that he attributes the trek mainly to the emancipation of slaves in Cape Colony. As that measure was admittedly carried out with great injustice to slaveholders, the fact does not discredit the movement, and we note it only because it has often been denied by admirers of the Boers. His early days were spent on the veld in what may fairly be called the heroic period of Boer history. Nurtured among the voortrekkers, trained to the saddle and the rifle from childhood, educated in a stern and simple faith, taught by tragic events to look upon Kaffirs as bloodthirsty and treacherous enemies, he grew up a leader of men. Of his hunting experiences, and of his early record in native war- fare, he has much to say, and here the natural man speaks out. These chapters may stand beside the works of Cornwallis Harris, Oswell, and Gordon Cumming : they form by far the most pleasant portion of the book. The glimpse that we obtain of the training of Boer children sixty or seventy years ago is really valuable. There are one or two very good hunting-

• The Iffentoirs of Pant Hriiger : Pour Times President of the South African Republic. Told by Himself. 2 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [82a1

stories, though their hero does not reproduce some of the most striking anecdotes told about his early days by Mr. Poultney Bigelow and others. In 1842, at the age of seventeen, he became a Deputy Field Cornet; a decade later, in the year of the Sand River Convention, he was elected Field Cornet. He had begun to make his mark. And those were stirring times ; after routing the Matabele, the trek-Boers had many native campaigns to fight. Mr. Kriiger's home was in the Transvaal, and he does not appear to have fought the British at Boomplats ; but in the civil wars of 1861-64—as confusing to follow as the constitutional history of a South American State—he held. important commands. He defeated his rival Schoemann, but shortly after was driven into the Free State by one Viljoen. Returning suddenly, he took his opponents by surprise, and succeeded in. installing his friend Van Rensburg in the Presidency of the South African Re- public. In 1857 he had accompanied Marthinus Weasels Pretorius in his abortive invasion of the Orange Free State, but we fancy that there was not very much love lost between the two, and Mr. Kruger negotiated the peace that was soon arranged with President Boshoff. A little later we find him on an embassy to Moshesh, the Basuto King, his interview with whom is recounted in a very spirited way. At the end of the Transvaal civil wars he was elected Commandant-General. Henceforth his position was established, but it is curious that this undoubtedly stark fighter never became President until after the retrocession. His skill in diplomacy (shown in his two visits to London and his negotiations with the Afrikander leaders at Cape Town) rather than his admitted personal courage raised him to the head of his people.

In 1876 Pretorius was driven from power because he had consented to the Keats award, which decided against the Republic's claims to certain territory near the diamcnd-fields. Mr. Kruger had disapproved of the arbitration : " I main- tained that the Republic did not need and never should accept arbitration regarding her own possessions, or between herself and ber subjects." What is right in a Republic is presumably wicked in an Empire : the Transvaal claims to authority over Gasibone were at least no stronger than the British claim to paramountcy over the Republic in 1899. The young Commandant-General, as a staunch " Dopper" or member of the Christelijk-Gereformeerde Church, naturally objected to the election of the free-thinking President Burgers which followed Pretorius's retirement. Paul Kruger became the leader of the Conservative party, which protested against Burgers's notions about railways and European innovations, paid as few taxes as possible, and refused to fight for such a leader. Kruger declined to lead the commandos against Secucuni if the President accompanied them. In his remarks on this campaign he omits to state that the Boers threw the brunt of the fighting on their Swazi allies. But of Burgers himself, now long dead, he speaks with studied moderation. In fact, his tone towards all prominent Boers is now most generous : no reader of the Memoirs could guess at the life- long rivalry between Paul KrUger and Piet Joubert. This is quite as it should be, but the ex-President is very acrimonious in his criticisms on all the individual Englishmen whom he mentions, except Lord Rosmead (Sir Hercules Robinson).

The South African Republic passed into very deep waters. Burgers has made no secret of his views as to the various reasons for the difficulties that grew up until the annexation in 1877 rescued the Boer community from some of its chief embarrassments. Mr. Kruger, indeed, is now very strong in his denunciations of Shepstone's action. But his own conduct in attempting to stand. against Burgers for the Presidency of the tottering Republic undoubtedly hastened events. Burgers roundly says :—" British interference got a strong support from the Boers themselves, and one of their chief leaders, P. Kruger, who had betrayed me after promising me his and his party's support." This is, of course, an ex parts statement, and must not be pressed too far. When the annexation was proclaimed, Kruger (who had been elected Vice-President in 1876) was sent, with Dr. Jorissen, as a delegate to Europe to protest. Returning with nothing accomplished, he came back a year later with Joubert, but found Sir Michael Hicks Beach no less obdurate than Lord Carnarvon, and somewhat less sympathetic. Henceforth Mr. Kruger threw himself into anti-English agitation. He fostered disaffection in the Transvaal ; he and Joubert went to Cape

Town to negotiate with theirfriends, and succeeded indefeating the Confederation Bill. Encouraged by this success, and con- fident of moral support at least from many Cape Afrikanders, they organised the rebellion which, after Majuba, led to the retrocession of the Transvaal.

We have no very great fault to find with what Mr. Kriiger says about these five years, except to note that he is guilty of a deliberate misstatement about the Zulu boundary question, that his account of Bronkborstspruit (quite apart from the question whether the Boers were or were not guilty of treachery) is not an accurate description of the engage- ment, that he gives an untrue version of his dealings with Sir Evelyn Wood, and that his malevolent reflections upon Sir Bartle Frere go beyond the bounds of criticism. But, at the risk of being tedious, we must call attention to one or two very striking facts of which the ex-President makes no mention at all. He does refer to Shepstone's report to Lord Car- narvon in which he is represented as saying that if the first mission to Europe failed, he would be "as faithful a subject under the new form of Government as be had been under the old." Mr. Kruger now flatly denies that he said anything of the kind, although, considering his attitude towards President Burgers, such a pledge would not have amounted to very much. But be ignores the fact, mentioned in the same despatch of Shepstone's (Parliamentary Paper C. 1,883; August, 1877), that during the whole period of his delegation to Europe to protest against the annexation he was in receipt of a salary from the British Government as a Member of the Executive Council of the Transvaal Territory. Again, he does not describe what actually passed at the inter- view with Lord Carnarvon, which the latter summed up in the following despatch to Shepatone (C. 1,961, February, 1878) :—

" They [i.e., Kruger and Jorissen] further assured me of their determination to use their best endeavours to induce their 3ountrymen to accept cheerfully the present state of things, and Df their desire, should they be permitted to do so, to serve Her Majesty faithfully in any capacity for which they might be judged eligible. I feel satisfied that I can rely on the sincerity of these professions, and I shall be glad if you feel yourself in a position to offer either their present or other suitable posts under your Government to these gentlemen."

Mr. Kruger remained a member of the Executive Council, and the manner in which he vacated that office is to be found in a letter addressed to him by Mr. Osborn, Secretary to the Government of the Transvaal, dated May 20th, 1878 (C. 2,144, August, 1878):- "I am directed by the Administrator to inform you that, in accordance with the provisions of the law under which you were appointed a member of the Executive Council, your tenure of that office expired on the 4th November last. After the line of con- duct which you have thought it right to pursue with regard to this Government, and especially after the undisguised notification which you have given it in the letter addressed by you and Mr. Joubert of the 14th instant to the Administrator, that you intend to persevere in an agitation that threatens, as you yourself believe, danger and ruin to the country, his Excellency sees no advantage and does not feel justified in suspending the operation A the law any longer for the purpose of enabling you to retain that office and the pay attached to it. I am also under the necessity of calling your attention to the fact that on the 8th Jan- uary last, when you personally applied to me at Pretoria to be paid the arrears of salary due to you, which according to law was at the rate of .2200 a year, you demanded salary at the rate of X300 on the ground that you had been promised that increased rate by the Administrator before your first departure for Europe, and that I, relying upon your word and influenced by your urgency as well as by a desire to avoid the appearance even of any breach of faith on the part of his Excellency, who was then absent from the seat of Government, paid you at this increased rate without further question and without authority. I now find that the only ground you had for preferring this claim was a private conversation with the Administrator, in which you complained that your salary was inadequate, whereupon he told you that he wished to retain your services to aid the new Government, and that he would recommend that you should be retained permanently as a member of the Executive Council to be called up for your advice when required, at a salary of £300 per annum instead of £200, to which you were then entitled. The reply you made was that you were a representative man, and must act according to the feelings of those you repre- sented, but that when you were relieved from those trammels, you could act according to your own convictions. You neither accepted nor rejected the proposal, and nothing has since passed to renew or confirm it; therefore you were not justified in making the demand you did, and I have made myself responsible for the payment to you, without authority, of the amount in excess of your usual salary So mach for Paul Kruger as a British official. We can understand that he does not care to dwell upon the record. Into the later history we have no intention of following the ex-President, merely because to do so would very largely be to repeat much of what we have written during the last six years. The negotiations over the London Convention of 1884 (when he visited England for the third time), the creation of Rhodesia, the commandeering crisis of 1894, the railway and customs questions (including the " Drifts " episode, over which Mr. Schreiner offended the Transvaal)„ and the various matters connected with the claims and grievances of the Outlanders, are presented with very con- siderable skill, and with a very natural determination to see only one side of the question. This is all familiar ground, and those who are prepared to accept the Transvaal point of view will not be dissuaded by any brief demurrer that we could here offer. The suzerainty controversy and the negotia- tions of 1899 are treated at great length, and we should advise readers of the book to consult on these matters Mr. Conk's Rights and Wrongs of the Transvaal War. On the whole, the Boer case is ably and not immoderately stated. But the ex-President says absolutely nothing of the rela- tions between his Republic and Germany, he suppresses the fact that the Transvaal revenues were almost entirely drawn from taxes paid by the Outlanders, and he omits to mention that the development of gold-mining permitted many Boers, himself among them, to make very large fortunes. He has nothing to add to what is already known about the Raid, but. be repeats his charges against Mr. Chamberlain. On the actual events of the war he does not dwell at any length: on our general conduct he embroiders the text kindly furnished to the enemies of Great Britain by Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman :— " The war in South Africa " (he quotes from his own speech at Marseilles) "has exceeded the limits of barbarism. I have fought against many barbarous Kaffir tribes in the course of my life; but they are not so barbarous as the English, who have burnt our farms and driven our women and children into destitu- tion without food and shelter."

If we consider that he had previously described how Kaffirs had flayed alive a Boer prisoner, and remember how, while he was speaking, his wife was living unmolested under British protection, it is perhaps worth while to mark these words.

Yet there is no such historical denunciation of Britain in this book as figures in Mr. Reitz's Century of Wrong, although we are always represented as aggressors, and the Boer raids (in defiance of Conventions) into Zululand and Bechuanaland in the early " eighties " are explained some- what disingenuously. But in the handling of individual Englishmen the bias is very strong. Sir Bartle Frere and Lord Roberts are vehemently abused. Mr. Gladstone is dis- missed without comment (really the various people to whom Mr. Gladstone sacrificed our interests are very ungrateful !) Mr. Rhodes is, naturally enough from the Transvaal point of view, painted in very dark colours, but it is a little odd to find him accused of having instigated Khama's people to a Boer Envoy to Lobengula (Khama the tool of Rhodes!) Sir Alfred Milner's appointment, we are told, "was received by the Jingoes with loud jubilation." "Jingo" is rather an unkind term to apply to Sir William Harcourt and Mr. Leonard Courtney, who expressed pleasure at that• appointment. Livingstone is described as having maintained an arsenal for the Bechuana chief Sechele, which was rightly confiscated by the Boers. This is interesting, because we have always understood that the Boers repudiated liability for the admitted destruction of Livingstone's property during this campaign. The justification now pleaded will hardly meet with general acceptance.

It is agreeable after this shrill vindictiveness to read some of the addresses of the ex-President to his people. AIL political questions are decided by the application of Old. Testament parallels : intimate knowledge of Scripture, great- natural shrewdness, homely humour, dominate all that he

It is not quite in the modern taste, but it all shown how essentially President Kriiger's mind dwelt in a seven- teenth-century atmosphere. The smooth periods, the orderly summaries, of the Memoirs have little in common with the primitive eloquence which swayed the Transvaal burghers. The book has this, at least, in common with Thuoydides, than the speeches are the best part of it.