After the Conferences between the British Commissioner and Governor of South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner and President Kruger, the peace-making efforts lacked acute interest, but were perseveringly continued. The latest concession of the Boers was that if the "people"--and by the "people" were meant the burghers of the Transvaal--approved, and the Government would try to get them to do so, a "retrospective five years' franchise" would be granted, and the amount of it was that of two-thirds of the white men of the Transvaal were to have one-fourth of the representation in the Volks Raad, but by no possibility, it was a little later explained, could the English language be permitted in that august body--the barbarous jargon of the Boers being the official language and the only tongue to be spoken. The President of the Orange State, as the gravity of the situation increased played a raucous second fiddle to President Kruger, and busied himself against the English, constantly professing friendliness to excess, working upon the line of securing the acceptance of an impossible complacency by the majority of white men in the Transvaal, in reference to the policy of their own subordination. That sort of submission is not according to the inheritance of the blood or the antecedent history of the English-speaking race, and the Uitlanders were not effusive with satisfaction even at the last Boer effort to make peace by offering a fractional representation in a body while they must listen to an unknown tongue and not be permitted to speak in the "Republican" parliament the language of the majority of the tolerably white men dwelling in the territory of the Republic. The utility of the hysteria of the President of the Orange State was in the warning his frequent and voluminous impracticable suggestions gave, that peace could only be preserved by another case of sublime magnanimity like that of Mr. Gladstone, whose Christian benevolence had given the Boers confidence in their own invincibility and also in the timidity of the British, who were supposed to be most happy when dealing in generosities toward enemies in arms and victorious over the generous. Suddenly the peace-maker, President of the Orange State, snatched the British gold in transit, arrested or expelled British subjects by countenancing and justifying a panic that led them to take flight from his peaceable State, at the same time commandeering the burghers in force, assuming that this was done in a purely pacific way; and on the fourth of October this man of peace wrote to Sir Alfred Milner that he must urge the "urgent necessity of intimating to me without further delay whether Your Excellency sees your way clear to give effect to these my views and wishes." [Sidenote: The President of the Orange Free State as Peace Maker]