“Yes, so prodigiously rapid is the growth of vegetation, trees, climbing plants and shrubs, when daily watered, that these shade trees which give the suburb such an appearance of age have only been planted during the last five years!”
Krupp Guns in Eden.
Now these picturesque and comfortable residences of such varying architecture, whose furniture I could just see through open windows and doors, and bespoke great wealth and taste, you must bear in mind would adorn Birmingham or Manchester. Imagine miles of such houses crowded with fair occupants and troops of daintily-clad children, their long hair floating in the wind as they sported in snowy garments on the lawns and amid the flowers, and then my surprise and something more as I suddenly came in view of a fort, which the rude Boers have built to terrorise this community. The superb ridge, which seemed to me with its beautiful houses and gardens a veritable Paradise after four thousand miles of travel over treeless plains, and which would certainly be an ornament to any city on the globe, had in its centre a large and ugly earthwork, behind which were monstrous Krupp guns to lay waste this Eden, should the humanity of Johannesburg ever be driven by despair to strive physically for the rights of freemen. The mere suggestion of it is brutish, and a Government which can coolly contemplate such a possibility and frighten timid women and young children with such horrid prospects, are only fit to be classed with the Herods of the Dark Ages.
Then and Now.
A short drive northward of the suburb placed me in a position to view the far-reaching desolate wastes of the primitive veld, and to realise more fully what human intellect, skill, energy, and capital have done on Hospital Hill and in Johannesburg itself. Twelve years ago there was not a vestige of life—human or vegetable, except the grass—to be seen within the entire range of vision from the Hill, and yet the creators of the remarkable transformation we had just seen were to be threatened with slaughter and devastation if once they plucked up courage to exact the rights which every civilised Government would long ago have granted to them!
Johannesburg and its Great Industry “Subject to Senile Madness and Boorish Insensibility.”
It were well now, after briefly showing what Johannesburg and its population is, that the chief of the State and his rustic burghers, in whose hands lie the future of this remarkable city and its industry, should be presented to your readers, in order that they might realise the striking incongruity of first-class mechanical ingenuity, spirited enterprise, business sagacity, and tireless industry being subject to senile madness and boorish insensibility. That such a thing should be is most preposterous and contrary to all human precedent. For elsewhere, and since the dawn of civilisation, Intellect has always become Master, Captain and King over Ignorance, but at Johannesburg it is Asinine Ignorance which rules Intellect. Another reversal of human custom is seen in the submissiveness of Intellect to Ignorance, and though, being naturally sensitive under the whip and restless under the goad, it remonstrates sometimes, its remonstrance is in such a sweet mild way that the spectator can only smile and wonder.
“Overmastering Surprise” at the State of Things on the Rand.
Fitting words are wanting to describe my overmastering surprise at the state of things in the Transvaal; I am limited by space and time, so that I must let my pen race over three pages and trust largely to the intelligence of those who read the lines. I have a printed cutting before me of a discussion in the First Raad of the Boer Republic, during which the President, in the support of his views, stands up and says that Isaiah had been told by the Lord that Israel had been punished because the rulers of that people had not hearkened unto the voice of the poor. Another speaker of similar intelligence rose up to contend that the Lord had enjoined that the rich, not the rulers, should help the poor, and Isaiah had not been told that the poor were to be helped with other people’s money. This construction of Scripture raised the President of the State to his feet again, and he reiterated the fact that the Lord had meant the rulers, whereupon another Senator interpolated the remark that some people were in the habit of shielding themselves behind the Bible with a view to saving their own pockets.