The great statesman Kruger, when asked just to "open the door a little" to outsiders, began an address in a village near Johannesburg by saying, "Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers, newcomers and others." The particular propriety of this was that for a long time Kruger could not be persuaded to visit Johannesburg. He hated the flourishing, stirring and steadily increasing city, and mistrusted the people, because he knew that his methods could not for a great while be submitted to by an enlightened community. He relaxed his vigilant attitude of hostility at last so far as to become the guest of the people of the city, and when he was civilly treated, and the fact that the Johannesburgers had been handsome in entertainment, he reviled them as "a set of lick-spittles."
The Wise Man's Treatment of the Natives
The style of the wise man's treatment of the natives appears in this:
The "April" case was one in which an unfortunate native named April, having worked for a number of years for a farmer on promise of certain payment in cattle, and having completed his term, applied for payment and a permit to travel through the district. On some trivial pretext this was refused him, his cattle were seized, and himself and his wives and children forcibly retained in the service of the Boer. He appealed in the nearest official, Field-cornet Prinsloo, who acted in a particularly barbarous and unjustifiable manner, so that the Chief Justice before whom the case was heard (when April, having enlisted the sympathy of some white people, was enabled to make an appeal), characterized Prinsloo's conduct as brutal in the extreme and a flagrant abuse of power perpetrated with the aim of establishing slavery. Judgment was given against Prinsloo with all costs. Within a few days of this decision being arrived at, the President, addressing a meeting of burghers, publicly announced that the Government had reimbursed Prinsloo, adding, "Notwithstanding the judgment of the High Court, we consider Prinsloo to have been right."
A Misleading Reputation
President Kruger has had provided for him a reputation that is astonishingly misleading. His part in public affairs has been one of vehement and vindictive self-assertion, participation in intrigue for office and for salaries—the constant intrusion of his personality in the rudest and most selfish ways into everything that concerns the state, disregarding the law, and with complete indifference to the rights of all persons except those who recognize him as their master. Abstaining himself from intoxicating drinks, he has long sustained a liquor ring in dispensing horrible drinks at scandalous profit. Given to self-praise for lofty purity in matters of state, he maintained a dynamite ring that cut off a large revenue, seemingly for no better reason than that his friends—his sycophant friends—were of it, and he has stooped to studied interference between employers and employed, that he might break up reasonable relations, believing himself in a position to profit by agitations; and in this insidious proceeding he has used secret service funds in the organization of hostilities for the embarrassment of employers, not because they had wronged the laboring man, but for the reason that they were not on their knees to him.
All this the world has accepted as manifestations of virtue, domestic kindliness and the religious sensibilities that are always in the public eye, that the multitude may gaze upon the goodness of the great and good man. The sincerity of his character as a professor of piety is not doubtful, but he carries into that, as into everything else, an ostentatious egotism, that among some nations and peoples is regarded as unbecoming a Christian statesman. It is fair to say of him that the one thing in which he seems to have profound convictions in addition to his self-esteem and hatred of English-speaking people, is in his devotion to the doctrines of the Old Testament. He does not seem to have made the acquaintance of the New Testament.
Racial Prejudices, Racial Hatreds
He has sought to keep apart the merchants and the miners, fearing their united power might interfere with his characteristic proceedings. He has lost no opportunity to promote belligerency among white laborers, and utterly and always ignores the rights as men of the natives. When intriguing with organized labor he has shown all the surface indications of partnership in carrying on, as the inside historian Fitzpatrick says, "an anticapitalist campaign with the Government press," and also "fostering the liquor industry with its thousands of reputable hangers on"; and more than all, he has without hesitation or variation flagrantly indulged racial prejudices and incited racial hatreds in South Africa, the most deplorable and dangerous possible use of power, and he has found constant consolation and been greatly sustained in his public pursuits by the hatred of the Whites against the Black and Brown people. But his favorite investment and educational enterprise is in arousing the animosities of the Boers against the British, that they may be at the same altitude with his own.
It is to the rough violence of President Kruger, his disregard of the laws, studied demoralization of his own courts, that he has repeatedly, recklessly overruled with sheer brute force—his heedless refusal to aid in the prosperous development of his own country, his gross and violent opposition to progress of all kinds—to the extension and protection of legitimate industries, and steadfast cares for those that are illegitimate, and sinister participation in corrupting schemes surrounded and inspired by the noisy congratulations of his habitual flatterers—all this afflicting him with the elephantiasis of conceit. It is to that and his effusion of arrogance to which we trace with certain steps the remote sources and the rampant rushing of the war, that is so destructive and wanton. There is no good in it, unless it involves the downfall of the Kruger tyranny, an example of individual caprice of a type of ruthless misgovernment, not surpassed in the self-indulgence of those who rule the barbarous tribes of Africa or sit on the gaudy thrones of Asia.