AN OMINOUS WAR-CLOUD.

New Zealand Times, Volume LXIX, Issue 3777, 27 June 1899, Page 4

AN OMINOUS WAR-CLOUD.

The trouble in the Transvaal is fast thickening to a crisis. The war-cloud daily becomes more foreboding. Thousands, fearing the coming storm, have fled from the gold reef city of Johannesburg. While thousands of British troops are gathering on the hill-crests over-looking the boundaries of the Transvaal, where our fellow-subjects are being forced, so to speak, to make bricks without straw by the modern South African Pharaoh, Mr Paul Kruger is loading the air with promises in which no one places the least reliance. Even the Boers, blinded as they are by prejudice and self-interest, know that Mr Kruger’s promises are merely uttered with a view to staving off the evil day. Ever since December, 1895, the date of the famous raid, the President of the Transvaal has been fertile in promises for the relief of the ontlander; but all the while the oppression has become intensified, the Convention has been violated, peaceful representations have

failed, tho recent conference proved abortive, and now the hour is fast approaching when “laws are commanded to .hold their longues among arms,” for the monarch of South Africa is evidently bent on crying “Havoc!” and letting slip the dogs of war.

To this end he is being instigated by the Boer burghers throughout the Rand, They have been holding meetings, as our cablegrams have informed us, and passing resolutions for the purpose of strengthening the President and the Volfcsrnad in defying the British and tho outlander. Indeed, the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church are taking up the cudgels against the outlander and are urging the Boers to trust in Providence,! their Mauser rifles and their Krupp guns in the coming conflict. While the Rev Mr Faure, who acted as interpreter for the Boors at the Convention in 1884, requests them to pray for the peace of their Jerusalm—Johannesburg—he declares in a letter to the “Rand Post,” a lending journal, and the most trusted organ of the Transvaal Government, that the first act of the Boers on war being declared would be to destroy that Jerusalem, to wreck the outlanders’ goldmines, and annihilate the property of the Britishers. This reverend gentleman sees "vhdons,” and calculates that the Dutch throughout Cape Colony would flock to the aid of their kinsmen in tho north, and that before the , war would have lasted many days, ten thousand British troops would have oeen shot down in tho Vaal drifts. Ten thousand Britishers, however, take a lot of killing. This clerical deliverance is an indication or the hatred that exists in the Transvaal towards the outlanders. Another Dutch gentleman, Mr M. D. Delport, writes warning his fellow-Afrikanders, and he bids them open their eyes that “they may see how the ■- English are becoming more insolent every day.” “And who,” ho asks, “is/ho cause of this? Nobody else but our own Government. It is high time that we burghers should make our voices heard'. ... To prevent

the outlanders getting the franchise, we’ll fight ns long as we can handle our rifles. Wo Tranavanlers consider that with God and our German Mauser rifles, we can resist the English troops.” Thus these Boers say their prayers, smoke the sights of their rifles, get behind the rocks, and in their minds ten thousand British soldiers already lie pierced with bullets. This is a vain imagining; yet is encouraged by no less a personage than General Joubert, who has said that “the Transvaal will not attack, but it will not hesitate to fight, and that with the utmost obstinacy, for the English have no righteous cause for a war with the Boers.” Then the Dutch newspapers -throughout ■ the Rand have assumed a belligerent spin. .. The “Rand Post” says ah iron hand ought to be brought down upon, the Hon Joseph Chamberlain’s, and it estimates the force that is able to support Mr Kruger in doing it is one hundred thousand men - forming: the forces of united Afrikanderdbm, who are stated to, bo “.straining at the leash to begin hostilities.” The war for which the Boers t seem to thirst may not be so far distant, as might he imagined; The British Government has declared that the- dynamite monopoly is a violation of'the Convention's'of iSSff and 1884. ,Mr Paul Kruger has failed to actually mitigate the injustice done to the outlanders within his borders. Britishers in the Transvaal have no voice in levying and spending of public money unless they have been naturalised for fifteen years; no power to control the payment of officials, or the educations’ grants of the State, or to benefit under them, unless their children learn the Dutch language, which is ’the only medium of education up to the third standard. They have no control of the municipal government of the town in which they form nine-tenths of 1 the populationno freedom of their press; no freedom tc hold public meetings, and no right to be tried by their peers. The British Government has made itself cognisant of the evils from which its subjects in the Transvaal suffer. The petition of the outlanders has been heard, and Mr Paul Kruger has failed to recognise, in his recent interview with Sir Alfred Milner, that that gentleman was backed up by the united desire of the British people for the redress of these grievances. The question is, now that force is to be applied against force, will Mr Kruger screw his courage to the sticking point ? He is evidently uneasy and restless and more fertile of promises than ever. If promises of reform would suffice, war would be averted. That time, however, is past. . We are inclined to believe that Mr Kruger will, in the end, avoid flooding the drifts with blood, as happened in October, 1895, when Mr Schreiner, then Attorney-General, and now Premidr of Cape Colony, declared that the only way to open the Vaal drifts was by a united Imperial and colonial expedition against the Transvaal forces. Mr Kruger yielded, me drifts wore opened, and hostilities were averted. As yet Mr Kruger has failed to recognise that Great Britain has set herself the task of compelling, by force it need be, the wmidrawal of the oppression and injustice irom which the outlanders suffer; lie still temporises and promises; but, to use an ancient simile, he might as--well.try to dam the flooded Vaal 4 river with bulrushes as attempt to pacify the demands for justice by empty promise,? and glittering generalities of speech.