Upon one occasion the Minister
of Mines attempted himself to jump a mine, having officially
learned some flaw in its title. The total official salaries had
risen in 1899 to a sum sufficient to pay 40 pounds per head to the
entire male Boer population.
4. That they had no control over education. Mr. John Robinson, the
Director General of the Johannesburg Educational Council, has
reckoned the sum spent on Uitlander schools as 650 pounds out of
63,000 pounds allotted for education, making one shilling and
tenpence per head per annum on Uitlander children, and eight pounds
six shillings per head on Boer children - the Uitlander, as always,
paying seven-eighths of the original sum.
5. No power of municipal government. Watercarts instead of pipes,
filthy buckets instead of drains, a corrupt and violent police, a
high death-rate in what should be a health resort - all this in a
city which they had built themselves.
6. Despotic government in the matter of the press and of the right
of public meeting.
7. Disability from service upon a jury.
8. Continual harassing of the mining interest by vexatious
legislation. Under this head came many grievances, some special to
the mines and some affecting all Uitlanders. The dynamite monopoly,
by which the miners had to pay 600,000 pounds extra per annum in
order to get a worse quality of dynamite; the liquor laws, by which
one-third of the Kaffirs were allowed to be habitually drunk; the
incompetence and extortions of the State-owned railway; the
granting of concessions for numerous articles of ordinary
consumption to individuals, by which high prices were maintained;
the surrounding of Johannesburg by tolls from which the town had no
profit - these were among the economical grievances, some large,
some petty, which ramified through every transaction of life.
And outside and beyond all these definite wrongs imagine to a free
born progressive man, an American or a Briton, the constant
irritation of being absolutely ruled by a body of twenty-five men,
twenty-one of whom had in the case of the Selati Railway Company
been publicly and circumstantially accused of bribery, with full
details of the bribes received, while to their corruption they
added such crass ignorance that they argue in the published reports
of the Volksraad debates that using dynamite bombs to bring down
rain was firing at God, that it is impious to destroy locusts, that
the word 'participate' should not be used because it is not in the
Bible, and that postal pillar boxes are extravagant and effeminate.
Such obiter dicta may be amusing at a distance, but they are less
entertaining when they come from an autocrat who has complete power
over the conditions of your life.
From the fact that they were a community extremely preoccupied by
their own business, it followed that the Uitlanders were not ardent
politicians, and that they desired to have a share in the
government of the State for the purpose of making the conditions of
their own industry and of their own daily lives more endurable.
