No two men more characteristic of the two utterly unlike and antagonistic political systems, which they respectively represented, could have been found. At the evening reception given by President Steyn on the opening day of the Conference, a big man, in a tightly buttoned frock-coat, stood just inside the door for ten minutes, and then moved awkwardly away. Above the frock-coat was a peasant's face, half-shrewd, half-furtive, with narrow eyes and a large, crooked mouth which somehow gave the man a look of power. This was President Krüger, _ætat._ 74. Once, doubtless, Paul Krüger's large and powerful frame had made him an impressive figure among a race of men as stalwart as the Boers. But he was now an old man: the powerful body had become shapeless and unwieldy; he had given up walking, and only left his stoep to drag himself clumsily into his carriage, and although he retained all his old tenacity of purpose, his mind had lost much of its former alertness. It needed all Mr. Smuts' mental resources--all that the young Afrikander had so recently learnt at Cambridge and the Temple--to enable the old President to maintain, even by the aid of his State-Attorney's ingenious paper pleadings, a decent show of defence against the perfect moderation and relentless logic with which the High Commissioner presented the British case. Lord Milner went to the Conference to make "one big straightforward effort to avert a great disaster"; Krüger to drive a "Kafir bargain." The end was as Lord Milner had foreseen. To yield the necessary instalment of reform seemed to President Krüger, in this mind, "worse than annexation"; and on June 5th Lord Milner declared, "The Conference is absolutely at an end, and there is no obligation on either side arising out of it." The Bloemfontein Conference made retreat for ever impossible. Lord Milner himself was perfectly conscious that in holding President Krüger to the franchise question he had made the conference the pivotal occasion upon which turned the issue of peace or war. He knew, when he closed the proceedings with a declaration that his meeting with President Krüger had utterly failed to provide a solution of the franchise question, that from this day forward there could be no turning back for him or for the Imperial Government. But he knew, too, that poor as was the prospect of obtaining the minimum reforms by any subsequent negotiation, nothing could contribute more to the attainment of this object than the blunt rejection of the makeshift proposals put forward by President Krüger at Bloemfontein. [Sidenote: After the conference.]