Mr. Fitzpatrick speaks somewhat more plainly in another place:-- "Outside the Transvaal Mr. Kruger has the reputation of being free from taint of corruption from which so many of his colleagues suffer. Yet within the Republic and among his own people one of the gravest of the charges levelled against him is, that by his example and connivance he has made himself responsible for much of the plundering that goes on. There are numbers of cases in which the President's nearest relations have been proved to be concerned in the most flagrant jobs, only to be screened by his influence; such cases, for instance, as that of the Vaal River Water Supply Concession, in which Mr. Kruger's son-in-law 'hawked' about for the highest bid the vote of the Executive Council on a matter which had not yet come before it, and, moreover, sold and duly delivered the aforesaid vote. There is the famous libel case in which Mr. Eugene Marais, the editor of the Dutch paper _Land en Volk_, successfully sustained his allegation that the President had defrauded the State by charging heavy travelling expenses for a certain trip on which he was actually the guest of the Cape Colonial Government." The light thus thrown on the dealings of Mr. Kruger is not a solitary gleam. It may be remembered that during the period of British rule in the Transvaal he had an appointment under Government. The terms of his letter of dismissal can be found on page 135 of Blue-Book, c. 144, and involving as they do a serious charge of misrepresentation in money matters, are useful when viewed in line with the above quotation. Mrs. Lionel Phillips imagines that every one must by this time have gauged the nature of the President, as she herself has done. She says:--