It has been an article of faith with them that Mr. Kruger missed his supreme chance at the time of the trial of the Reformers, and that from the date of the death-sentence his judgment and his luck have failed him.  He abused his good fortune and the luck turned, so they say; and the events of the last three years go to support that impression.  To his most faithful ally amongst the Uitlanders the President, in the latter days of 1896, commented adversely upon the ingratitude of those Reformers who had not called to thank him for his magnanimity; and this man replied:  ’You must stop talking about that, President, because people are laughing at you.  You made a bargain with them and they paid the price you asked, so now they owe you nothing.’  But his Honour angrily repudiated that construction:  nothing will convert him to that view.

It has been said that Dr. Jameson is the best friend Paul Kruger ever had, and with equal truth it may be said that, in 1896, President Kruger proved himself to be the best friend of the Reformers.  Not even the most sanguine of his enemies could have expected to witness the impolitic and unjust acts by which the President revealed himself, vindicated the Reformers, and undermined a position of unparalleled strength in an incredibly short time.  The bargaining and the bad grace which marked the release of the Reformers had prepared the world to view Mr. Kruger’s action and attitude a little more critically than it had hitherto been disposed to do.  The real conditions of Dr. Jameson’s surrender had also become known, and although the action of the Boer leaders was regarded as far too trifling a matter to be seriously considered as against the Raid itself, nevertheless a residuum of impression was left which helped to form opinion at a later stage.  There followed, too, an irritating correspondence between the Transvaal and Imperial Governments, in the course of which Dr. Leyds successfully established his skill as a smart letter writer and his limitations as a statesman.  The Municipal Law, the first product of the ‘forget and forgive’ proclamation—­which proclamation, by-the-bye, had already begun to prove itself an awkward weapon placed in the hands of his enemies by President Kruger himself—­had been exposed and denounced as farcical, and it now required but little to convince the once admiring world of the President’s real character and intentions.  That little was forthcoming in a touch of ridicule more potent than all arguments.

The Transvaal Government formulated their demand for damages for the Raid in a form which made everyone smile—­L677,938 3s. 3d. for actual outlay, and L1,000,000 for ‘Moral and Intellectual Damages.’  What with the fines of the Reformers, and the seizure of the provisions of all sorts acquired by them for the purposes of the Reform movement, which latter must have exceeded L50,000 in value, the Boer Government had already received upwards of a quarter of a million, and had, in fact, made a profit on the Raid; so that this demand came as a surprise even to the Uitlanders, as much perhaps due to the extraordinary phrasing of the demand as to the amount claimed.