23 FEBRUARY 1901, Page 3

We treat that the British public will not ignore the

letter of the arrogantly bitter and half-crazy Boer, signed "P. which appears in Wednesday's Times. The writer is the man who poured forth a stream of not very savoury rhetorical lave at the beginning of the wax, and prophesied against. the British people, evidently imagining himself to be as inspired as was Elijah. Now, however, he virtually admits that he was more like the false prophets than the true when he prophesied smooth things for the Boers, "and sent them in a compliment to be knocked on the head at Ramoth Gilead," to borrow a phrase from South. "P. S.". now tells us that the Boers' cause is hopelessly ruined, and that their vision of supremacy has passed away for ever. He adds that all nations agreed in thinking England dead, when in truth she was only dead-drank, dragged by the love of peace and luxury. He ends by exhorting us not to let those who worked for the Empire be ignored, snubbed, and degraded while disloyalty and treachery are condoned. South Africa will very quickly recover from the war, and -the two races settle down, if only justice, and not sentiment, it given a free hand. " P. S." may be mad, but there is certainly a great deal of method in his madness. The friends of the Boers, however, who praised his first letters as if they were the denunciations of "a prophet new inspired," will, no doubt, now hold that he has lost his inspiration. He never had that but he has a good deal of political prescience, though of rather a flamboyant kind.