Some surprise is expressed at the disagreement between the Boers
who fill the Volksraad and the leaders who signed the Convention, but we believe the explanation is this :—The leaders are experienced men, very patriotic, but aware of the weakness of their State, and not so interested as the masses in the legal position of the Blacks. The Volksraad, on the other hand, is filled with representatives of the country farmers, who live in widely-scattered homesteads, to whom their " patriarchal " authority on their lands is all-in-all, and whose one idea of England is that she makes black men equal to white. Nearly half of them are " Doppers," who hold as a creed that the Lord has given them the Transvaal as a possession and its people to be their bondsmen. All these farmers are ready to "trek" rather than bear any control in their treatment of their natives,—that being the point upon which they first rose. We very much doubt whether they will yield, as their idea is that they may win ; and that if they do not, they can still occupy the splendid Doab between the Zam- besi and Matabele rivers. The one check on them is their fear lest a renewal of the war should be followed by a servile insurrection, and even that does not weigh with the Doppers.
