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Updated: May 25, 2025
Schalk Burger should assume the acting Presidentship, since Mr. Kruger's advanced age and feeble health did not permit his risking the hardships attendant on a warlike life on the veldt. It was decided Mr. Kruger should go to Europe and Messrs. Steyn and Burger should move about with their respective commandos. They were younger men and the railway, would soon have to be abandoned.
As a matter of mere material fact, the Bastille when it was taken was not a horrible prison; it was hardly a prison at all. But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a sure instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance, at the last General Election, or for President Kruger's hat in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect.
'President Brand realised that closer union with the turbulent and misguided Transvaal, led by Kruger's challenging policy, would inevitably result in a disastrous war with England. I remember once stating these arguments in the Volksraad, and wound up my speech by saying, "May Heaven grant that I am wrong in what I fear, because, if I am right, then woe, woe to the Orange Free State."
A similar suggestion was made to several of the Reformers at the time of the judicial crisis by one of the judges of the Transvaal High Court, when it was hoped to enlist the sympathies of the Uitlanders with a movement to curtail President Kruger's power and to establish republicanism on a firmer basis in South Africa.
In dealing with President Kruger's personal attitude it is not perhaps pertinent but, it is interesting, to recall an incident of his earlier career a parallel between the prisoner and the President.
"Have you been lugged up again before the chief?" she asked. "Oh, yes. Often ... hee-hee ..." "What for?" "Because the other day I started to shout in the street: 'Bargains! Who'll buy Sagasta's umbrella, Kruger's hat, the Pope's urinal, a syringe lost by a nun while she was talking with the sacristan! ..." El Conejo trumpeted this at the top of his lungs and Justa held her sides with laughter.
First the sentencing of the Johannesburg Reformers startled England by its severity; on the top of this came Kruger's exposure of the cipher correspondence, which showed that the invasion of the Transvaal, with the design of seizing that country and adding it to the British Empire, was planned by Cecil Rhodes and Beit which made a revulsion in English feeling, and brought out a storm against Rhodes and the Chartered Company for degrading British honor.
Past old Kruger's house, a cottage you might almost call it, with its lions in front and several old burghers in black crying in the verandah, we went at a foot's pace, choking in the cloud of red dust, with the strains of "God Save the Queen" in our ears. We emerge into the square.
But this was precisely what the Boers of Kruger's way of thinking were determined to refuse them. They were resolved that Boer ascendancy in the Transvaal should not be weakened. They therefore denied to the new immigrants all the rights of citizenship, and would not even permit them to manage the local affairs of Johannesburg.
The road led across a steep mountain and through thickly grown kloofs, which prevented us from reaching the enemy until they had burnt all the houses, destroyed the seed plants, and loaded the families on their carts, after which they withdrew to the camp at Kruger's Post. We at once charged the enemy's rearguard, and a heavy fight followed, which, however, was of short duration.
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