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Tyranny has a genius for creeping in everywhere, and under any and every form of government.  This is being strikingly illustrated in these days.  Under the name of a Republic, the traditions of a Military Oligarchy have grown up, and stealthily prevailed.

When a nation has no recorded standard of guiding principles of government, it matters not by what name it may be called—­Empire, Republic, Oligarchy, or Democracy—­it may fall under the blighting influence of the tyranny of a single individual, or a wealthy clique, or a military despot.

Too much weight is given just now to mere names as applied to governments.  The acknowledged principles which underlie the outward forms of government alone are vitally important, and by the adherence to or abdication of these principles each nation will be judged.  The revered name of Republic is as capable of being dragged in the mire as that of the title of any other form of government.  Mere names and words have lately had a strange and even a disastrous power of misleading and deceiving, not persons only, but nations,—­even a whole continent of nations.  It is needful to beware of being drawn into conclusions leading to action by associations attaching merely to a name, or to some crystallized word which may sometimes cover a principle the opposite of that which it was originally used to express.  Such names and words are in some cases being as rapidly changed and remodelled as geographical charts are which represent new and rapidly developing or decaying groups of the human race.  Yet names are always to a large part of mankind more significant than facts; and names and appearances in this matter appeal to France and to Switzerland, and in a measure to the American people, in favour of the Boers.

Among the concessions made by Lord Derby in the Convention of 1884, none has turned out to be more unfortunate than that of allowing the Transvaal State to resume the title of the “South African Republic.”  In South Africa it embodied an impossible ideal; to the outside world it conveyed a false impression.  The title has been the reason of widespread error with regard to the real nature of the Transvaal Government and of its struggle with this country.  If “Republican Independence” had been all that Mr. Kruger was striving for, there would have been no war.  He adopted the name, but not the spirit of a Republic.  The “Independence” claimed by him, and urged even now by some of his friends in the British Parliament, is shown by the whole past history of the Transvaal to be an independence and a freedom which involve the enslavement of other men.