The wives of the Boers are very powerful, and it is possible that Mrs. Kruger may have prevailed in some way over her husband, for at last, after five weary months of imprisonment, after delays, suspenses, and alarms too numerous to be here recounted, the prisoners, on the 11th of June 1896, were released. They were required to pay a fine of L2000, and to sign a pledge not to interfere with politics for three years. It was owing to this pledge that the valuable book, "The Transvaal from Within," which has here been quoted, was not published till affairs therein set forth had come in 1899 to the painful climax of war! Mr. Lionel Phillips, however, was not so wise as Mr. Fitzpatrick. When Sir John Willoughby in 1897 attacked the Reform Leaders of Johannesburg in the _Nineteenth Century_, Mr. Phillips replied to it in the same Review, August 1897, defending himself and his comrades from the charges made. In consequence of this action Mr. Phillips was considered to have broken his pledge and was condemned by the Transvaal Government to banishment. Doubtless it was without much regret that he shook the dust of that ill-conditioned State from off his shoes. THE ULTIMATUM After the turmoil of 1896 affairs declined from bad to worse. The state of tension between the oppressed Uitlanders and the now suspicious Boers became from day to day and year to year more acute, till at last it was almost unbearable. The incompetence of the police showed that robbery, and even murder, might at any moment be perpetrated and go unpunished, and alarm on this score was not allayed by the action of a constable in shooting dead a Uitlander named Edgar for having met his insults with a blow. To thoroughly appreciate the misery and insecurity of the Uitlanders, the atrocity of the Government, and the uncloaked hostility to Great Britain that has existed till now, we may quote a description of the situation given last year by Professor James Liebmann. He wrote:-- "In the Transvaal a state of things reigns supreme which cannot be surpassed by the most corrupt of South American Republics. There the Boer shows his character in its most unpleasant features. Low, sordid, corrupt, his chief magistrate as well as his lowest official readily listens to 'reasons that jingle,' and, like the gentleman in the 'Mikado,' is not averse to 'insults.' He calls his country a republic--it is so in name only. The majority of the population, representing the wealth and intelligence of the country--the Uitlanders--are refused almost every civil right, except the privilege of paying exorbitant taxes to swell an already overgorged treasury. Under this ideal(?) government, which is really a sixteenth-century oligarchy flourishing at the end of the nineteenth, and is, certainly not a land where 'A man may speak the thing he will,'