President and Madame Kruger have had sixteen children, seven of whom still live. One of his sons is the President's private secretary, and a youth of decidedly modern ideas and tendencies. Another son is a private in the Pretoria police, a state military organization in which he takes great pride. A third occupies his father's farm near Rustenberg. The other children are daughters, who are married to Boer farmers and business men. One of Kruger's sons-in-law is Captain F. C. Eloff, who was taken prisoner by the Uitlanders during the raid, and who has since aroused the enmity of the English residents by freely expressing his opinion of them in public speeches. Captain Eloff is several times a millionaire, and lives in a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar mansion.
Popular report in Pretoria has it that the President's wealth amounts to a million dollars, but his mode of living certainly does not betray it. His salary as President is thirty-five thousand dollars, in addition to which he is annually allowed fifteen hundred dollars for house-rent, or "huishuur." He has long since purchased the house in which he lives, but, as the allowance of fifteen hundred dollars is annually paid to him, the English residents aver that the amount is intended as a slight reimbursement to him for the money he spends for the coffee and tobacco used by the burgher callers at his cottage. During the later years of his life Barney Barnato, the wizard of South African finance, supplied to the President all the tobacco he used, and consequently Mr. Kruger was able to save the Government tobacco allowance. Barnato also presented to Mr. Kruger two handsome marble statues of lions which now adorn the lawn of the presidential residence. A photograph which is greatly admired by the patriotic Boers represents Mr. Kruger appropriately resting his hand on the head of one of the recumbent lions in a manner which to them suggests the physical superiority of the Boers over the British.
Mr. Kruger has always been a man of deep and earnest religious convictions. In his youth he was taught the virtues of a Christian life, and it is not recorded that he ever did anything which was inconsistent with his training. An old Zulu headman who lives near the Vaal River, in the Orange Free State, relates that Mr. Kruger yoked him beside an ox in a transport wagon when the trekkers departed from Natal in the early '40s, and compelled him to do the work of a beast; but he has no good reason for declaring that his bondsman was Mr. Kruger rather than any one of the other Boers in the party.