Martinus Theunis Steyn, late President of what was once the Orange Free State, is in almost all respects a marked contrast to the Transvaal President, whose folly he abetted and whose flight for a while he shared. Steyn, speaking broadly, is almost young enough to be Kruger's grandson, and was never, as Kruger was from his birth, a British subject, for he was born at Wynburg some few years after the Orange Free State received its independence. Whilst Kruger was never for a single hour under the schoolmaster's rod, and is laughingly said even now to be unable to read anything which he has not first committed to memory, Steyn is a man of considerable culture, having been trained in England as a barrister, and having practised at the bar in Bloemfontein for six years before he became President. He therefore could not plead ignorance as his excuse when he flung his ultimatum in the face of Great Britain and Ireland. Whilst Kruger was a man of war from his youth, a "strong, unscrupulous, grim, determined man," Steyn never saw a shot fired in his life except in sport till this war began, yet all strangely it was the fighting President who fled from the face of the Guards, with all their multitudinous comrades in arms, and never rested till the sea removed him beyond their reach, while the lawyerly President, the man of peace, doubled back on his pursuers, returned by rugged by-paths to the land he had ruined, and there in association with De Wet became even more a fugitive than ancient Cain or the men of Adullam's cave. That many of his own people hotly disapproved of the course their infatuated ruler took is common knowledge; but by no one has that fact been more powerfully emphasised than by Paul Botha in his famous book "From Boer to Boer." Rightly or wrongly, this is what, briefly put, Botha says:-- [Sidenote: _Paul Botha's opinion of this Ex-President._]