A long and remarkable study of the personality of President
Kruger from the pen of their Pretoria correspondent appears in Tuesday's issue of the Manchester Guardian, a paper sin- cerely and vehemently opposed to the South African policy of the British Government. The writer declares his convic- tion that no strong man in or out of the Raad can really stand up to the President, who is virtually endowed with a dictatorship, that "the confidence of the majority in him is so great that he could force even an acceptance of a five-year franchise without compensating concessions," and that to this extent the Transvaal may be regarded as a one-man State. This declaration lends ominous significance to the numerous and damaging admissions made in the course of the article,—viz., that while no sure conclusion can be come to as regards the charges of personal corruption, Mr. Kruger has not a "nice sense of honour" ; that the history of the dynamite concession unquestionably supports a printd-facie suspicion; that he has lax notions about "presents," and a disposition to screen certain friends who have indisputably yielded to corruption ; that he displays a good deal of nepotism, and only reads extracts from newspapers which are supplied him by his friends. "Even as regards the most material facts there is thus a constant danger of un- fair selection and misrepresentation." The writer, who had a long conversation with the President, holds that his de- fence against the charges of having broken his promise of equal treatment was "far from logically complete," its chief interest lying " in the light it throws upon Kruger's conception of politics ; fighting has played so essential a part in the making of the nation that it seems to him that such personal service is the only basis of burgher rights." The writer is not even prepared to deny that the single genuine passion of Mr. Kruger's life is hatred of the English. His "inscrutability is a strong factor in the situation." The nearest approach to positive praise in the whole article is the statement that the President is "a fanatic, a narrow-minded bigot, if you will, but no hypocrite."
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