THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1900.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11539, 26 November 1900, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1900.

_ 9 ■ Nobody would accuse Mr. Paul Kruger of being a Bob Acres, although bis utterances call to mind the grandiloquent bombast in which that famous hero indulged when his enemy was far away. It is remarkably easy for an ex-Dictator to assure sympathetic French audiences that the Boers will fight to the last man, woman, or child, for he himself, with most of the other ambitious agitators whose amazing folly drove the Boer Republics to ruin, has carefully placed several thousand miles of foreign territory between himself and the fighting line. But in judging Mr. Kruger we must make allowances for the strange ignorance and cunning which has always been a part of his character and without which even his extreme obstinacy could not have induced him to plan and attempt the overthrow of our Empire in South Africa. Moreover, he has always been singularly lacking in that inherent sense of conduct and courtesy which is so usually associated with masterful men, even when they have not had the educational opportunities which foster and develop those qualities. The charm of the Stuarts lay in the fact that, intolerable and impossible though they were in their clay of triumph, they were royal to the finger-tips in their dark nights of despair. The same may be said for the hapless Bourbon, who ruled like a madman and went to the scaffold like a martyr. But the Celtic blood has always shown the poetic instinct, has' always been able on great occasion to feel itself the appointed player in great human tragedy. Mr. Kruger is not so gifted. Uncouth and vulgar in his time of power, he is as uncouth and vulgar in his fall. Only by a serene silence could he have made a dignified entry into foreign lands, being a fugitive, loaded with booty, who has left fanatical countrymen to prolong a hopeless fight. For when he speaks he can only indulge in idle bombast concerning the cause he has abandoned, in libellous scurrility concerning the generous foemen from whose face he has fled. But this is the Kruger personality. This is the enemy whom our Little England Administrations vainly attempted to placate and whom our tolerant Empire has had to humble to the dust.

How great has been Mr. Kruger's fall, we may infer from the despair which pervades his declarations. We know now that he was warned by honourable friends like the Chief Justice of Cape Colony, by Mr. Schreiner himself, by several of the more far-seeing Afrikanders, that his hopes of ultimate triumph were impossible of attainment. We also know—or, rather, are reliably informedthat the Boer Republics were given private warning that European intervention could not be expected, and that they ought to accept the fair terras offered by Sir Alfred Milner while there was yet time. But we also know that treacherous British politicians were in direct communication with the enemy, and were insanely encouraging them to expect a Little England reaction and the securing to them of such terms as would leave them unshorn of power and with the added prestige of being able to maintain themselves in arms against the soldiers of the Queen. We know what they expected from the Bryan party in America. We know how they were incited and encouraged bj the Anglophobists of Europe. So that it may easily be seen that, swayed by their insane aspirations, they discounted altogether the warnings of their real friends and counted upon _ whole array of influences to protect them from the penalty of their invasion of our Empire should the appeal to arms be decided against them. We must remember that Mr. Kruger has once before seen the British flag hoisted in Pretoria; indeed, he has himself drawn the Queen's pay and betrayed her while drawing it. The more we learn ofthe inner history of the South African troubles, the more evident it is that the Boer oligarchy, ignorant and ambitious as it was, did not realise that it was staking everything when it invaded Natal. With an infatuated folly, incomprehensible to us because we cannot appreciate their overwhelming conceit in their political cunning or their overwhelming contempt for our past Imperial policy, they unquestionably calculated that at the best they could drive the English into the sea, that at doubtful issue they could compromise by securing absolute independence and an extension of territory and that at the worst they could place themselves in statu quo. To his horror, and amazement, Mr. Kruger has found that Britain aroused is indeed a lion, that no sacrifice is too great, no cost to be counted as compared to our national honour and national existence. His insolent invasion has been stemmed, his armies shattered, his cities occupied, his whole territory ' overrun. The same terms are his as would have been ours had he been victor. There was no room in South Africa for two Powers, and Britain has entered into possession. And when he looks abroad for help he sees the same complete frustration of his hopes. Imperialism has triumphed at Home, its only 'active opposition being in the feeling that the War Office has not done all that it should have done for our own brave soldiers. The Bryan party has been' scotched, if not utterly killed, by the American

electors. Other issues have made the Boer Question an indifferent one to European Powers, even were they disposed to enter) the lists against the unexpected strength of the British Empire. And in South Africa, the cunning and treacherous guerilla warfare by which it was thought the annexed country could be made too warm for British sovereignty, is being stamped out- by making the Boers feel and know that our great general can be stern as well as generous, firm as well as, humane. With his whole world of vain hopes and false suppositions and fanatical imaginings in pieces around him. it would be too much to expect of Mr. Kruger that he should say anything but what he does.

For there is a pitiful ignorance glittering among his calumnies. Never have barbarous tribes treated him and his people as our Imperial soldiers have treated him— never have the Kaffirs chased him like a hunted deer; it has always been the other way, hitherto. "We have destroyed farms—and taught the "snipers" and their friends that a new law rules in South Africa, and thus the country is being pacified, to Mr, Kruger' sore distress. But his French friends might tell him how every ununiformed man whom the Germans caught in arms or with powder-marked fingers was shot on the spot. American mercenaries ■could have told him how General Sherman laid the country waste, as an act of stern military necessity, all along the route of the famous "march to the sea." Every student of history could tell him that the baffled leaders of ambitious and broken movements always make wild declarations of fighting to the end, particularly when they are safe on foreign shores. And since we know with what dignity our soldiers have borne themselves, and how assured the extermination or submission of all the guerillas is, and how the better sense of the Boers is forcing them to accept the inevitable, we may well ignore the ravings of Mr. Kruger. Particularly, we may be thankful that the power of the man to disturb the peace of the world has gone for ever.