that they received the new High Commissioner’s assurance that as the representative of her Majesty he had plenty of work before him in visiting and making himself acquainted with the conditions and requirements of her Majesty’s dominions in South Africa, the people of which had the first call upon his services.  The statement cleared the political atmosphere and had a distinctly cooling effect upon the overheated brain of the Boer party, who had by this time convinced themselves that Pretoria was firmly established as the hub of the universe and that an expectant world was waiting breathlessly to know what President Kruger would do next.

Mr. Conyngham Greene, an experienced member of the Diplomatic Corps, who had been appointed towards the end of 1896 to succeed Sir Jacobus de Wet as British Agent in Pretoria, had by this time gained some experience of the ways of Pretoria.  Probably few servants of the Crown have been called upon to perform a service more exacting or less grateful than that which fell to the British Agent during the period in which Mr. Conyngham Greene has held the post.  Conscious that his Government was prevented by the acts of others from vindicating its own position, hampered by the knowledge of immense superiority of strength, dealing with people who advanced at every turn and under every circumstance their one grievance as a justification for all the acts of hostility which had preceded that grievance or had been deliberately perpetrated since, he was compelled to suffer snubs and annoyances on behalf of his Government, with no relief but such as he could find in the office of recording them.  A good deal had been done by Mr. Conyngham Greene to establish visible and tangible evidence of the desire of her Majesty’s Government to interest themselves in the condition of British subjects and—­as far as the exigencies of a very peculiar case would for the time permit—­to protect them from at least the more outrageous acts of injustice; but the strength of the chain is the strength of the weakest link, and it was always felt that until the link in Cape Town was strengthened there was not much reliance to be placed upon the chain.

Very frequently surprise has been expressed that, after the fortunate escape from a very bad position which the Jameson Raid afforded to President Kruger’s party, the Boers should not have learned wisdom and have voluntarily undertaken the task of putting their house in order.  But having in mind the Boer character is it not more natural to suppose that, inflated and misled by a misconceived sense of success and strength, they should rather persist in and exaggerate the ways which they had formerly affected?  So at least the Uitlanders thought and predicted, and their apprehensions were amply justified.  In each successive year the Raad has been relied upon to better its previous best, to produce something more glaring and sensational in the way of improper laws and scandalous measures or revelations than anything which it had before done.  One would imagine that it would pass the wit of man to devise a means of exploiting the Uitlanders which had not already been tried, but it would truly appear that the First Volksraad may be confidently relied upon to do it.