LADY GLADSTONE.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 836, 7 June 1910, Page 3

LADY GLADSTONE.

BESET WITH PROBLEMS. "Lady' Gladstone, who , leaves 'with Gladstone at the. end of next week for South Africa, as the wife of the Cover nor-General, will have before her tho most complicated social, task that ever an English lady could be called upon to face," a South African correspondent. ' . ■ "No country is so beset with problems as is South Africa, .'and, as nearly every nation of tho world is strongly represented in its different towns, the duties of the official hostess of the Administra-. tion coll for an exercise of tact and,, diplomacy that would dismay many of. the most expert social leaders of the Homeland. ' - '

"At Government, House, a beautiful mansion at Brynterion,' Pretoria, dcirigned in the South African Dutch stylo of architecture by Mr. Herbert Baker, the architect who built Groote Schuur in Capo Town for tho late Cecil Rhodes, tho principal receptions will be held. The gathering which assembles on such occasions is perhaps ..without equal in. the, world. In the first place, there are the Ministerial heads of.the Government, the leaders of the Boer people—Louis Botha, who won fame as a soldier; Jan Smuts, equally distinguished as a. general and as a scholar of Cambridge; Rissik, a Hollander and a survivor of the old Kruger regime. Then corno the officers of the .Military and Civil Administrations, such men as you might meet at a levee at St. James's, side by side with such old veterans as Do Wet,- Hertzog, ex-President Steyri, aud JJelarey—names that aro as household words amongst tho old South African people. "The great financiers of Johannesburg, representatives of the cosmopolitan world of money, both Englishmen and foreigners, powerful factors in tho social world, will he found at \ Lady Gladstone's receptions with the growing group of gentlemen farmers from England who are finding in South Africa a new' home. Then rugged old.colonial soldiers, colonels and majors who havo fought in every native war, Will be represented, and a large .sprinkling of keen Americans who direct the complicated mechanical side of tho great mining industry.. < . . .'■' V.

"Consuls, of most of..the countries of the world, and. representatives of tho '«._„ commercial houses of England, America, and Germany; tho beads of all tho different -religious bodies, Portuguese officials'. Marques; feverstricken missionaries-.from' thp interior, and weather-beaten old prospectors, who come in from unknown areas to pay their respects to His Majesty's representative; police officers from the native reserves, whoso word is law over' a million Kaffirs; Boer farmers, with their vrouws, who.'tfeck in by wagon; and tho great mass .of - professional men, representative of both' the English-colonial and the Dutch-colonial .-elements in tho great sub-Continent—these are the various, sections'of .the. white population of South Africa,-who are, .as it were, in,the melt-ing-pot. It will depend considerable- on Lord Gladstone's; discretion and on Lady Gladstone's fact as a hostess if they ai'c to be wedded into one great nation under tho British Flag."