It is difficult to seo on what grounds President Kriiger and his advisers could reject the latest proposals of the British Government, They have not asked for a single concession to the Outlanders which the Boer Government has not already expressed its willingness to make. The sole point of difference between the two Governments is that the Transvaal wants to couple with the concessions a repudiation of suzerainty and an acknowledgment of the Republic's status as a "Sovereign International State;" and to this the British Government refuses to assent. The only ground on which the Transraal could reasonably refuse the scheme proposed is that it would endanger Boer supremacy in the 'Transvaal; and since the scheme is their own thy cannot possibly maintain this contention. The question of suzerainty or no suzerainty has no bearing on this point; and it is clear that, if they believed that the scheme would' endanger Boer supremacy, they would never hare formulated it. "There is, therefore, a strong hope that the Boors will agree to adopt the scheme, substituting for the declaration of absolute independence a modified declaration to which the British Government could give its consent. But in the state of feeling now existing in the Transvaal all is uncertainty as to what the result will be. The Raads have completed their consideration of the dispatch, and we are now Qnaiously awaiting the Boer Government's reply. There are many who still four that no settlement is possible without a war.
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the intensity of feeling created in this country by the re-condemnation of Dreyfus. one expected the result. The trial was reported in all the newspapers with a fulness utterly unexampled in the case of a trial taking place in a foreign country; and the evidence of Dreyfus's innocence, and of the shameful conspiracy of perjury and forgery by which the attempt to get at the truth had been so long frustrated, was so overwhelming that no one believed that the most prejudiced and dishonest of judges would have had the effrontery to bring ina verdict of "guilty. The feel orion, and shame and indis universal; and it is not surprising that, in some instances it took the form of unjustly visiting the sins of the five judges at Rennes and their supporters on the heads of unoffending Frenchmen who hi in our midst. We are expecting every day now to hear that Dreyfus has been pardoned by President Loubet; but although everyone will rejoice that the martyr whose sufferings have been so terrible should be at once restored to his family, such a result will by no means renew one's confidence in French justice. Englishmen generally will be di posed to agree with the sentiment expressed by the English Chief Rabbi in his Atonement Day Sermon, yesterday: "A pardon should be rejected with scorn, for where no crime has been committed how can a pardon be granted
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.