who taxed the miners for this article alone $2,600,000 a year beyond the highest price it could otherwise have been bought for.  This was his own act, the Volksraad not being consulted.  Besides the high price, the quality of the explosive was bad, often causing accident or death.  When it did cause accident or death, the miners were prosecuted by the Government, from whose agent they were compelled to buy it, and fined for having used it!

“At the time the Convention was signed, in 1884, the franchise was obtainable after one year’s residence.  President Kruger determined to serve the Uitlanders, however, as George III.’s Government served the American Colonists, that is, tax them while refusing them representation in the control of the taxes.  He went on at one and the same time increasing their burdens monstrously, while he prolonged the period of residence that qualified for a vote from one year to five, and so on, till he made it fourteen years—­or fourteen times as long as when the Convention was signed.  Nor was this all.  He reserved the right personally to veto any Uitlander being placed on the register even after the fourteen years if he thought he was for any reason objectionable.  That is, the majority of the taxpayers were disfranchised for ever!  These Uitlanders had bought and paid for 60 per cent. of all the property in the Transvaal, and 90 per cent. of the taxes were levied from them; an amount equal to giving every Boer in the country $200 a year of plunder.

“Is a country that is so governed justly to be called a ‘Republic?’

“But even the Boers themselves have been adroitly edged out of power by Paul Kruger.  The Grondwet, or Constitution, provided that to prevent abuses in legislation, no new law should be passed until the bill for it had been published three months in advance.  To evade this, Kruger passed all kinds of measures as amendments to existing laws; which, as he explained, not being new laws, required no notification!  Finally, however, he got the Volksraad to rescind this article of the Grondwet; and now, as for some time past, any law of any sort can be passed by a small clique of Kruger’s in secret session of the Raad without notice of any sort, and without the knowledge or assent of the people.  The Boers have no more voice in such legislation than if they were Chinese.  The Transvaal is only a Republic in the same sense that a nutshell is a nut, or a fossil oyster shell is an oyster.

“All that the British Government has ever contended for with President Kruger has been the fair and honourable observance of his engagement in respect of equal rights in Article XIV. of the 1884 Convention.  This he has persistently and doggedly refused, while he has been using the millions of money he has wrung from the Uitlanders to purchase the material for the war he has been long years preparing on such a colossal scale to drive the English out of those Colonies in which they have given absolute equality to all.