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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 32, 11 August 1904, Page 18

The story comes at second-hand from Router. But let that pass. Poor old Oom Paul and his burghers (as Sir William Butlef stows) began to piepare for war from the moment that {lie Jameson raid— that outrage against the law of nations— made it clear that a Avar was inevitable. But we need no Va'ble to know that Paul Kruger thought 'it was a pity there was war ' He is at least credited with having said so se\cral times, and during the farcical ' negotiations,' while the enemy was swarming from ever-sea and massing on the frontiers of the two little Protestant republics— nominally to enable British subjects to renounce their allegiance ai accelerated speed— the grey-haired old President made concession after concession in the hope of saving his country from the horrors of an armed struggle. Oom Paul was a convinced and pious Protestant, even though his piety was of a dour Calvinistic type. But it certainly was sufficient to teach him that war— even a successful war— is a moral as ..well .as. physical calamity and that the forgiveness of enemies is an element aiy precept of Ihe Christian faith. And who that has read the stoiy of the old ex-President's life will doubt his simple trust, that a merciful Providence will make everything, even In the former Boer republics, ' come right in the end.'

It is a curious irony oi fate that those who were four years ago angrily denounced as ' pro-Boers ' are now— so far as Rand politics go— the pro-British, and that the jingoes who jelled ' pro-Boer ' four years ago are the anti-British and pro-Chinese of to-day. The lattery howc\ei, are left with the pious consolation thai the replacement of the starving British workers on the. Rand by s'fcuit-eyed yellow slaves from the East may possibly piodme one compensating benefit : the heathen seiis need idols in their prison-compounds — for Hie leasts of the Full Aloon and the Dragon Boat will, no doubt, need to be properly observed And this may gi\e an impetus to the Birmingham idol industry, for this ' justice to Britons ' the veldt was painted with good New Zealand blood. It enables one to appreciate the feelings of the Reefton mother who recently wrote to the Defence Department, Nelson, acknowledging receipt of a South African medal for her son ; ' My slon,' said she, ' like so many others, fails to appreciate this medal as he otheTwise would have done had the " Chows " not been allowed to occupy a country *hat Britisher^ sufieied and endured so much to win.'

Our pen had wandered thus far when a friend placed in our hands ,in interpret at inn. by a Dunedin froe-lanoe, of Oom Paul's last words — with some obscure compliments ' to the address of the editor of the " Tablet ".' Paul Kruger is credited with having ' said that he no longer hated (he English, adding that "it was a pity there was war, but everything will come right in the end " ' Here is the free-lance version of the same : ' What he said was that Britain had been just, that the war was a mistake, and that all would come right in the end ' I. nconscious humor is ever the best. And this ' interpretation ' of the dying ex-President's (alleged) words is set forth in apparent good faith and solemn earnestness It deserves the immortality that has been achieved by an English humorist's ' explication ' of the nursery rhyme about the cat and the fiddle. But tlure arc wondrous literary possibilities in the man who could assure his readers, in all grim earnestness, that a cornet was once upon a time admitted into the communion of the Catholic Church (how it was caught and baptised he did not say), and that for its misconduct on some occasion, it was banished from the communion of the faithful and deprived of the Sacraments when living and of Chustian burial when dead !