neglect.  Undeterred, however, by this failure, the National Reform Union, an association which organised the agitation, came back to the attack in 1894.  They drew up a petition which was signed by 35,000 adult male Uitlanders, a greater number than the total Boer male population of the country.  A small liberal body in the Raad supported this memorial and endeavoured in vain to obtain some justice for the newcomers.  Mr. Jeppe was the mouthpiece of this select band.  ’They own half the soil, they pay at least three quarters of the taxes,’ said he.  ’They are men who in capital, energy, and education are at least our equals.

What will become of us or our children on that day when we may find ourselves in a minority of one in twenty without a single friend among the other nineteen, among those who will then tell us that they wished to be brothers, but that we by our own act have made them strangers to the republic?’ Such reasonable and liberal sentiments were combated by members who asserted that the signatures could not belong to law-abiding citizens, since they were actually agitating against the law of the franchise, and others whose intolerance was expressed by the defiance of the member already quoted, who challenged the Uitlanders to come out and fight.  The champions of exclusiveness and racial hatred won the day.  The memorial was rejected by sixteen votes to eight, and the franchise law was, on the initiative of the President, actually made more stringent than ever, being framed in such a way that during the fourteen years of probation the applicant should give up his previous nationality, so that for that period he would really belong to no country at all.  No hopes were held out that any possible attitude upon the part of the Uitlanders would soften the determination of the President and his burghers.  One who remonstrated was led outside the State buildings by the President, who pointed up at the national flag.  ‘You see that flag?’ said he.  ‘If I grant the franchise, I may as well pull it down.’  His animosity against the immigrants was bitter.  ’Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers, newcomers, and others,’ is the conciliatory opening of one of his public addresses.  Though Johannesburg is only thirty-two miles from Pretoria, and though the State of which he was the head depended for its revenue upon the gold fields, he paid it only three visits in nine years.

This settled animosity was deplorable, but not unnatural.  A man imbued with the idea of a chosen people, and unread in any book save the one which cultivates this very idea, could not be expected to have learned the historical lessons of the advantages which a State reaps from a liberal policy.  To him it was as if the Ammonites and Moabites had demanded admission into the twelve tribes.  He mistook an agitation against the exclusive policy of the State for one against the existence of the State itself.  A wide franchise would have made his republic firm-based and