Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 2).djvu/50

 speak presently, was so inflated by it, that it may be said to have governed all his actions. The idea is grand, for a South African Dutchman patriotic, and for a Republican Dutchman not unnatural. But such ideas must depend on their success for their vindication. When unsuccessful they seem to have been foolish thoughts, bags of gas and wind, and are held to be proof of the incompetency of the men who held them for any useful public action. Neither will Mr. Pretorius junior nor Mr. Burgers ever be regarded as benefactors of their country or as great statesmen; but the bosoms of each have no doubt swelled with the aspiration of being called the Dutch Washington of South Africa. I think I may say that Mr. Brand, who is now President of the Orange Free State, is imbued with no such vaulting ambition, whatever may be his ideas on the course of things in the womb of time. He is mildly contented to be President of the Free State, and as long as the Free State has a history to be written he will be spoken of as the man who in the midst of its difficulties made its existence possible and permanent.

The Volksraad of the Free State did not sympathise with the views of their President from the Transvaal, and in 1863 he resigned the place. He was soon re-elected President of the Northern Republic and remained in that office till he quarrelled with his own Volksraad or was quarrelled with by them. He struggled hard and successfully to extend the bounds of the Empire, and claimed among other lands that tract of land of which I have already spoken, which is far to the south-west of the Transvaal, but still to the north