Part 39 (1/2)
I think it is but just to bear tribute to the patriotic endeavours of a small band of enlightened men in the Volksraad who have earnestly condemned the policy of the Government and warned them of its danger. To Mr. Jeppe, Mr. Lucas Meyer, the De Jagers, Mr. Loveday, and a few others in the First Raad, leaving out the second Raad, we owe our best thanks, for they have fought our battle and confirmed the justice of our cause. But when we look to the debates of the last few years, what do we find? All through a spirit of hostility, all through an endeavour not to meet the just wants of the people, not to remove grievances, not to establish the claim to our loyalty by just treatment and equal laws, but to repress the publication of the truth, however much it might be required in the public interest, to prevent us from holding public meetings, to interfere with the Courts, and to keep us in awe by force.
THE POWERS OF THE EXECUTIVE.
There is now threatened a danger even graver than those which have preceded it. The Government is seeking to get through the Legislature an Act which will vest in the Executive the power to decide whether men have been guilty of sedition, and to deport them and confiscate their goods. The Volksraad has by resolution affirmed the principle, and has instructed the Government to bring up a Bill accordingly next session. To-day this power rests justly with the courts of law, and I can only say that if this Bill becomes law the power of the Executive Government of this country would be as absolute as the power of the Czar of Russia. We shall have said goodbye finally to the last principle of liberty.
PRESIDENT KRUGER INDICTED.
Coming to the Executive Government, we find that there is no true responsibility to the people, none of the great departments of State are controlled by Ministerial officers in the proper sense, the President's will is virtually supreme, and he, with his unique influence over the legislators of the House, State-aided by an able if hostile State Secretary, has been the author of every act directed against the liberties of the people. It is well that this should be recognized. It is well that President Kruger should be known for what he is, and that once for all the false pedestal on which he has so long stood should be destroyed. I challenge contradiction when I state that no important Act has found a place on the Statute-book during the last ten years without the seal of President Kruger's will upon it; nay, he is the father of every such Act. Remember that all legislation is initiated by the Government, and, moreover, President Kruger has expressly supported every Act by which we and our children have been deprived by progressive steps of the right to acquire franchise, by which taxation has been imposed upon us almost exclusively, and by which the right and the liberty of the Press and the right of public meeting have been attacked.
THE JUDGES AND THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT.
Now we come to the judicial system. The High Court of this country has, in the absence of representation, been the sole guardian of our liberties. Although it has on the whole done its work ably, affairs are in a very unsatisfactory position. The judges have been underpaid, their salaries have never been secure, the most undignified treatment has been meted out to them, and the status and independence of the Bench have on more than one occasion been attacked. A deliberate attempt was made two years ago by President Kruger and the Government to reduce the bench to a position subordinate to the Executive Government, and only recently we had in the Witfontein matter the last of the cases in which the Legislature interfered with vested rights of action. The administration of justice by minor officials, by native commissioners, and by field-cornets, has produced, and is producing, the gravest unrest in the country; and, lastly, gentlemen,
THE GREAT BULWARK OF LIBERTY,
the right to trial by jurymen who are our peers, is denied to us. Only the burgher or naturalized burgher is ent.i.tled to be a juryman; or, in other words, anyone of us is liable to be tried upon the gravest charge possible by jurymen who are in no sense our peers, who belong to a different race, who regard us with a greater or lesser degree of hostility, and whose pa.s.sions, if inflamed, might prompt them, as weak human creatures, to inflict the gravest injustice, even to deprive men of their lives. Supposing, in the present tense condition of political feeling, any one of us were tried before a Boer jury on any charge having a political flavour about it, should we be tried by our peers, and should we have a chance of receiving even-handed justice?
THE SECRET SERVICE FUND.
When we come to the Administration, we find that there is the grossest extravagance, that Secret Service moneys are squandered, that votes are exceeded, that the public credit is pledged, as it was pledged in the case of the Netherlands Railway Company, and later still in the case of the Selati Railway, in a manner which is wholly inconsistent with the best interests of the people.
SQUANDERING THE PUBLIC REVENUE.
The Delagoa Bay festivities are an instance of a reckless disregard of a Parliamentary vote; 20,000 was voted for those useless festivities-about 60,000 was really expended, and I believe certain favoured gentlemen hailing from Holland derived the princ.i.p.al benefit. It is said that 400,000 of our money has been transferred for some extraordinary purpose to Holland. Recently 17,000 is said to have been sent out of the country with Dr. Leyds for Secret Service purposes, and the public audit seems a farce. When the Progressive members endeavoured to get an explanation about large sums of money they were silenced by a vote of the majority prompted by President Kruger. The administration of the public service is in a scandalous condition.
A CORRUPT LEGISLATURE.
Bribery and corruption are rampant. We have had members of the Raad accepting presents of imported spiders and watches wholesale from men who were applying for concessions, and we have the singular fact that in every instance the recipient of the gift voted for the concession. We have the President openly stating that such acceptance of presents was wholly moral. We have a condition of affairs in which the time of the meeting of the Volksraad is looked upon as the period of the greatest danger to our interests, and it is an open secret that a cla.s.s of man has sprung up who is in constant attendance upon the members of the Volksraad, and whose special business appears to be the 'influencing' of members one way or the other. It is openly stated that enormous sums of money have been spent, some to produce illegitimate results, some to guard against fresh attacks upon vested rights. The Legislature pa.s.sed an Act solemnly denouncing corruption in the public service. One man, not an official, was punished under the law, but nothing has ever been done since to eradicate the evil.
AND A TAINTED CIVIL SERVICE.
I think thousands of you are satisfied of the venality of many of our public servants. I wish to guard against the a.s.sumption that all public servants are corrupt. Thank G.o.d there are many who are able and honourable men, and it must be gall and wormwood to these men to find the whole tone of the service destroyed, and to have themselves made liable to be included under one general denunciation. But there can be no health in an administration, and the public morals must be sapped also, when such things as the Smit case, and the recent Stiemens case, go unnoticed and unpunished.
TWO GLARING CASES.
I think it right to state openly what those cases are. N.J. Smit is the son of a member of the Government. He absented himself for months without leave. He was meantime charged in the newspapers with embezzlement. He returned, was fined 25 for being absent without leave, and was reinstated in office. He is now the Mining Commissioner of Klerksdorp. He has been charged in at least two newspapers-one of them a Dutch newspaper, Land en Volk, published within a stone's throw of the Government Office-with being an 'unpunished thief,' and yet the Government have taken no notice of it, nor has he thought fit to bring an action to clear himself. In the Stiemens case two officials in the Mining Department admitted in the witness-box that they had agreed to further the application of a relative for the grant of a piece of public land at Johannesburg on condition that they were each to receive one quarter of the proceeds. A third official, the Landdrost of Pretoria, admitted that he had received 300 for his 'influence' in furthering the application; yet no notice had been taken by the Government of their scandalous conduct, and sad to say the judges who heard the case did not think it their duty to comment strongly upon the matter. I have in my possession now a notarial deed which proves that the Railway Commissioner, the Landdrost, and the Commandant of Pretoria are members of a syndicate whose avowed object is, or was, to wrest from the companies their right to the 'bewaarplaatsen.' This shows what is going on, and what is the measure of safety of t.i.tle to property. Those who should guard our rights are our worst enemies. In a law introduced by the present Government, the Government, instead of the Courts, are the final judges in cases of disputed elections. No Election Committees are allowed. This operates against candidates opposed to the Government, because the Government has virtually a vast standing army of committee men, henchmen, officials being allowed openly to take part in swaying elections, and the Government being in a position, by the distribution of contracts, appointments, purchase of concessions, the expenditure of Secret Service money and otherwise, to bring into existence and maintain a large number of supporters who act as canva.s.sers always on the right side in times of elections.
NATIVE AFFAIRS.
The administration of native affairs is a gross scandal and a source of immense loss and danger to the community. Native Commissioners have been permitted to practise extortion, injustice, and cruelty upon the natives under their jurisdiction. The Government has allowed petty tribes to be goaded into rebellion. We have had to pay the costs of the 'wars,' while the wretched victims of their policy have had their tribes broken up, sources of native labour have been destroyed, and large numbers of prisoners have been kept in goal for something like eighteen months without trial. It was stated in the newspapers that, out of 63 men imprisoned, 31 had died in that period, while the rest were languis.h.i.+ng to death for want of vegetable food. We have had revelations of repulsive cruelty on the part of field-cornets. We all remember the Rachman case, and the April case, in which the judges found field-cornets guilty of brutal conduct to unfortunate natives; but the worst features about these cases is that the Government has set the seal of its approval upon the acts of these officials by paying the costs of the actions out of public funds, and the President of the State a few days ago made the astounding statement in regard to the April case, that, notwithstanding the judgment of the High Court, the Government thought that Prinsloo was right in his action, and therefore paid the costs. The Government is enforcing the 'plakkerswet,' which forbids the locating of more than five families on one farm. The field-cornets in various districts have recently broken up homes of large numbers of natives settled on 'Uitlanders” lands, just at the time when they had sown their crops to provide the next winter's food. The application of this law is most uneven, as large numbers of natives are left on the farms of the Boers. Quite recently a well-known citizen brought into the country at great expense some hundreds of families, provided them with land, helped them to start life, stipulating only that he should be able to draw from amongst them labour at a fair wage to develop his properties. Scarcely had they been settled when the field-cornet came down and scattered the people, distributing them among Boer farms. The sources of the native labour supply have been seriously interfered with at the borders by Government measures, and difficulties have been placed in the way of transport of natives by railway to the mines. These things are all a drain upon us as a State, and many of them are a burning disgrace to us as a people.
THE EDUCATION SCANDAL.
The great public that subscribes the bulk of the revenue is virtually denied all benefit of State aid in education. There has been a deliberate attempt to Hollanderise the Republic, and to kill the English language. Thousands of children are growing up in this land in ignorance, unfitted to run the race of life, and there is the possibility that a large number of them will develop into criminals. We have had to tax ourselves privately to guard against these dangers, and the iniquity of denying education to the children of men who are paying taxes is so manifest that I pa.s.s on with mingled feelings of anger and disgust.
RAILWAYS.
This important branch of the public service is entirely in the hands of a corporation domiciled in Holland. This corporation holds a concession, of course under which not only was there no adequate control over expenditure in construction, but it is ent.i.tled to charge and is charging us outrageous tariffs. How outrageous these are will be seen from the admission made by Mr. Middelberg that the short section of 10 miles between Boksburg and Krugersdorp is paying more than the interest on the cost of the construction of the whole line of railway to Delagoa Bay. To add these to its general revenue, of which 10 per cent, is set aside as a sinking fund, and then to take for itself 15 per cent. of the balance, the Company reports annually to the Raad from Amsterdam in a language which is practically foreign to it, and makes up its accounts in guelders, a coinage which our legislators I venture to say know nothing of; and this is independence. We are liable as guarantors for the whole of the debt. Lines have been built entirely on our credit, and yet we have no say and no control over these important public works beyond the show of control which is supposed to be exercised by the present Railway Commissioner. The Company in conjunction with the Executive Government is in a position to control our destinies to an enormous extent, to influence our relations internally and externally, to bring about such friction with the neighbouring States as to set the whole of South Africa in tumult. Pet.i.tions have been presented to the Raad, but the President has constantly brushed these aside with the well-worn argument that the independence of the State is involved in the matter. It is involved in the matter, as all who remember the recent Drifts question will admit. I have been told that it is dangerous for the country to take over the railway, because it would afford such an immense field for corruption. Surely this is the strongest condemnation of the Government by its friends, for if it is not fit to run a railway, how can it be fit to manage a whole State? The powers controlling this railway are flooding the public service with Hollanders to the exclusion of our own people, and I may here say that in the most important departments of the State we are being controlled by the gentlemen from the Low Country. While the innocent Boer hugs to himself the delusion that he is preserving his independence, they control us politically through Dr. Leyds, financially through the Netherlands Railway, educationally through Dr. Mansvelt, and in the Department of Justice through Dr. Coster.
CUSTOMS AND TRADE.