Dr. Leyds.

Evening Post, Volume LIV, Issue 75, 25 September 1897, Page 4 (Supplement)

Dr. Leyds.

A sketch of Dr. Leyds, State Secretary of the Transvaal, is given by Mr. Poulteney Bigelow in Harper's Magazine for March. He is stated to be a handsome man, about 35 years old in appearance, slim and erect, 'with black glossy hair and large dreamy eyes, such as he had frequently noticed in first violins at a classical concert. •He struck me,' writes Mr. Bigelow, las a man of another world, doing his daily work here faithfully, but without pleasure. His conversation is that of a speculative philosopher without human passions. His sentences issue with a cadence and correctness suggestive of rehearsal under a careful bandmaster. One cannot conceive of Dr. Leyds ever showing temper or haste. He deals with the" problem of humanity, though himself without the feelings of a man. I felt his intellect, his logic, his selfrestraint, his exquisite capacity for veiling his meaning in polite phra3es. Leydß has no hate and no love. He is neither a Boer nor an Afrikander, nor even a Dutchman by birth, yet at a strikingly early age he is virtually the leading spirit in a Government whose present object seems to be to make the Transvaal a sovereign state, even if this involves war with England and an alliance with Germany. Dr. Leyds is never personal. He deals with forces that affect humanity, and does not bother his head about a man more or less. He is convinced that the Transvaal can prosper best by total separation from English influence, and in that sense he encourages everything calculated to produce distrust, if not dislike, of England.' Mr. Bigelow, looking at the question of the Transvaal as an American, says that England (under Mr. Gladstone) committed an awful blunder when it made peace with the Boers after the defeat of Majuba Hill. The large British forces which were then on the eve of entering the Transvaal to wipe out the memory of the defeat should have been allowed to march on.