Andreas Pretorius was the first President of the now established and recognised nationality which, with a weak ambition which has assisted much in bringing it to its ruin, soon called itself the South African Republic,--as though it were destined to swallow up not only the Free State but the British Colonies also. In this, however, Andreas Pretorius himself had no part. The passion of his soul seems to have been separation from the British;--not dominion over them. He died within two years, in July 1853, and his son was elected in his place. The father was certainly a remarkable man,--the one who of all his class was the most determined to liberate himself from the thraldom of English opinions. Mr. Theal in his history[2] of South Africa well describes how this man had become what he was by a continued reading of the Old Testament. The sanguinary orders given to the chosen people of the Lord were to him orders which he was bound to obey as were they. Mr. Theal quotes a special passage from the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, to which I will refer my reader--“When thou comest nigh unto a city fight against it.” The Israelites are enjoined either to slay or to enslave. And Pretorius felt that such were the commands given to him in reference to those natives among whom his lot had cast him. They were to him the people of the cities which were “very far off,” and whom he had divine order to enslave, while the more unfortunate ones who would still fain occupy the lands on which it suited him and his people to dwell, were “the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites” whom the Lord had commanded him utterly to destroy. With such authority before him, and while black labour was so necessary to the cultivation of the land, how could he doubt about slavery? In studying the peculiarity of the Dutch character in South Africa and the aversion of the people to our ways we have always to remember that they had been brought up for ages in the strictest belief in the letter of scripture. The very pictures in their bibles were to them true pictures, because they were there. It was so two hundred years ago with a large sect in Europe,--from which sect they had sprung. They had grown in the new land without admixture with the progressing ideas of Europe. They had neither been enlightened nor contaminated by new systems of belief, or unbelief. So it has come to pass that an institution which is so abhorrent to us as to make us feel that the man who is stained by it must be a godless sinner, is still to them a condition of things directly authorized and ordered by the Almighty. By our persistency, by our treaties, by our power, by enforcing upon their inferior condition as the very trade-mark of our superiority the command that slavery shall exist no longer, we have driven them to deny it, and have almost convinced them that slavery is no longer possible. But that