Last message of president S. J. P. Kruger to his people.
Addressed to general Louis Botha.
Dear General,
It is a great privilege to be able to acknowledge the receipt of your cablegram and letter of 23rd and 29th May respectively, conveying to me the greetings of the Congress held from 23rd to 25th May at Pretoria.
In all the sorrow and grief that has befallen me these greetings have made me deeply thankful. And with all my heart I thank those who have spared a thought for their age State President during their deliberations about the present and future: by so doing they show that they have not forgotten the past
For, he who desires to build a future, dare not neglect the past.
Seek, therefore, all that is good and beautiful in the past, build on it your ideal, and strive to realise that ideal for the future.
It is true much of what has been built is now destroyed, despoiled and ruined; but through singleness of purpose and unity of strength what now lies shattered can still be restored.
I am thankful to see that this unity and this concord prevail amongst you.
Do not forget that grave warning that lies in the words, "Divide and rule" ; never let these words apply to the South African nation. Then our people and our language will endure and prosper.
What I myself shall live to see of this, rests with God. Born under the British flag, I do not wish to die under it. I have learnt to accept the bitter thought of death as a lone exile in a foreign land, far from my kith and kin whose faces I am not likely to see again; far from a country to which I devoted my whole life in an effort to open it up for civilisation and where I saw my own nation grow.
But this grief will be softened if I may cherish the belief that the work once begun, continues; for then the hope and the expectation that the work will end well, will me strength. So be it.
For the bottom of my heart I greet you and my people.
Villas Des Prierriers 17,
Clarens (Vaud), Switzerland.
29th June, 1904.