REMARKABLE DISCLOSURES.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 293, 11 December 1899, Page 3

REMARKABLE DISCLOSURES.

CAPETOWN, December 7.

■ Politically, one of the strongest inaictments of the President and Mr Reitz, State Secretary of the Transvaal, was issued in the form of a letter from Mr Theophilus Schreiner, a brother of the Cape Premier, and of the well-known South African writer, Olive Schreiner. The hitter's political bitbernjess has a.bjsolutely estranged from her many who admired her as a writer of South African novels. Her brother, Theophilus Schreiner, is champion of the total abstinence movement in South Africa. Writing of Mr Reitz's manifesto, in which the latter declared that Sir Alfred Milner, Mr Chamberlain, the British Cabinet, the Queen, and the British nation were murderous robbers and breakers of treaties, Mr Schreiner recalls a personal conversation ho had with Mr Reitz in Bloemfontein IS years ago, shortly after the retrocession of the Transvaal, when Mr Reitz was Judge of the Orange Free State, and was busy establishing the Afrikander Blind. At that time Mr Reitz asked Mr Schreiner to become a member of the Bund, but he (Mr Schreiner) declined to do so. The following extracts from the letter of Mr Schreiner throw a lurid light upon the fool's paradise we have been living in since Mr Gladstone allowed the original colonial Boers and their descendants to form the premier Dutch Republic in South Africa:—The conversation between Mr Reitz and Mr Schreiner was as follows: — Mr Reitz: "Why do you refuse? Is not the object of getting- people to take interest in) .political matters not a g-ood one?" Mr Schreiner: "Yes, it is, but I seem to see plainly here between the lines of the Constitution much more is ultimately aimed at than appears on the surface." Mr Reitz: "What?" Mr Schreiner: "1 see quite clearly that the ultimate object aimed at is the overthrow of British power, and the expulsion of the British flag from South Africa." Mr Reitz (with a pleasant and conscious smile as of one whose secret thought and purpose. had been disC 0A rered, and who was not altogether displeased that such was the case): "Well, what if it is so?" Mr Sehreiner: "You don't suppose, do you, that that flag is going to disappear from South Afi'ica Avithout a tremendous struggle and fight?" Mr Reitz (with the same pleasant self-conscious, self-satisfied, and yet semi-apologetic smile): "Well, I suppose not; but even so, what of that?" Mr Schreiner: "Ony this, that Avhen that struggle takes place you and I will be on opposite sides, and, what is I more, God, who was on the side of the i Transvaal in the late Avar because ithad right on its side, will be on the side of England, because He must view with abhorrence any plotting and I scheming to overthroAv her power and position in South Africa, Avhich have been ordained by Him." Mr Reitz: "We .will see." Mr Schreiner concludes his letter by re-affirming that the object of the Afrikander Bund Avas to averthroAV the British power in South Africa, and by stating that the proudest moment in Mr Reitz's life Avas Avhen he wrote the forty-eight hours' ultimatum that has precipitated the present Avar. Mr Schreiner states in blunt language Avhat all English-speaking and thinking people here have been aware of for years, but the insidious terrorism of the Bund has silenced the tongues of the i'eAV who, without support from inside or outside, could do nothing.