Tho Kruger Spirit.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVII, Issue XIII, 28 September 1901, Page 585

Tho Kruger Spirit.

It still remains a moot point what is the quality of Kruger’s patriotism: but even if it is all he has assured the world it is, he has not bequeathed it to his family in all its boasted strength. The cables tell us that. Oom Paul's youngest son, Tgaard, has surrendered to Uord Kitchener, in order to secure the safety of the farms his father ceded to him. What a lapse in one generation from the irreconeilablb Krugerian attitude! Is Tgaard a miserable exception to the unconquerable spirit of his house, or is his action only the revelation of a family trait? Whichever it is, the broad result is the same. The same selfish nature which, in spite of all his protests, the world still suspects as dominating the father, that same looking after number one has conquered in the son whatever of the more chivalric spirit that prefers poverty and death rather than yield, he may possess. It ill becomes a Kruger to be among those wliem a love of this world's goods has brought to make terms with the enemy. The name ought never to have been in the list of those who surrendered for filthy lucre’s sake. Better the race had died out. leaving the name as the synonym of irreconcilability, if of nothing higher; or that its living members had survived with no other inheritance than that name. Now, it may happen that the family of Kruger will be among the plutocracy of the new colonies, while the descendants of nobler men who sacrificed their all, it may be for an unworthy cause, pass their days in the shadow of poverty.