The Transvaal Republic had dragged along a sad existence for many years, troubled constantly by native incursions from without, and debt, quarrelling, and discontent from within, when the Rev. Thomas F. Burgers was elected President in the year 1872. He was to revolutionize the entire country, and to make a new and improved Holland in Southern Africa. Gifted with certain talents, among which that of oratory was conspicuous, Burgers was deplorably deficient in a knowledge of men and business. His plans were utopian, visionary, and unsound. He caused hundreds of Boers to leave their adopted country, by forcing on them a system of education from which the teachings of religion were excluded; contracted a loan of £300,000 for a railway from Delagoa Bay, which would have cost millions; designed a fanciful coat of arms and flag; caused gold coins to be issued with his own likeness stamped upon them, and played such "fantastic tricks before high heaven" as to help forward that crisis of bankruptcy and ruin from which it would have been very difficult, even by an exactly opposite course, to have saved the country. During the absence of the President in Europe, in 1875, Sekukuni, the principal chief of the Bapedi people, broke out in rebellion. In April, 1876, he was called upon to submit, but in place of doing so boldly claimed the larger portion of the Lydenburg and Pretoria districts. A commando then marched against him, and succeeded in taking "Mathebi's Kop," which was grandiloquently styled the Gibraltar of South Africa. A subsequent attack upon Sekukuni's head kraal was a failure. The prosecution of the war was then entrusted to volunteers, and after a short time an inglorious peace was concluded. This treaty was only made to be broken, as it was repudiated and treated with contempt by Sekukuni. [Sidenote: _Annexation, history of._]