Facts and Figures
The area of the Republic is 119,139 square miles; the white population, according to the State Almanack for 1898, is 345,397, and the native population, 748,759. The seat of government is Pretoria, with a white population of 10,000. The largest town is Johannesburg, the mining center of Witwatersrand gold fields, having a population within a radius of three miles, according to the census of 1896, of 102,078 persons, of which number 50,907 were whites, 952 Malays, 4,807 Coolies and Chinese, 42,533 Kaffirs, and 2,879 of mixed race. One-third of the population of the Republic is estimated to be engaged in agriculture, the lands of the Republic generally, outside the mining districts, being extremely productive, and the demand for farm products in the mining regions very great, even in excess of the local products at the present time."
It does not in the least soothe the Boers that they have a good market for their farm products, for which they are indebted almost exclusively to English enterprise in great feats of engineering, in the application of the most modern methods of mining, and to immense investments, in the cheapening of transportation, and extending the capacities and facilities of the poor as well as the rich, for swift and easy communication with neighbors.
Boer Prejudice and Intolerance
The chief care, concern and anxiety of the Boer is that a government of the people must not by any chance be established in Transvaal. It is the elementary principle of the Boer disposition and government, that there are no real "people" except Boers, who place the Hottentot, the Englishman, the Zulu and the Kaffir, the American, the German and the Frenchman on the same level. He will have none of them except in the capacity of subordinates, and when it suits his humor, servants of the established class that dominates. The native population is double that of the number of whites, but that does not concern the Boer. His Republicanism takes no account of people with darker skins than his own. In the most important part of the Transvaal, the Boers themselves are in a pronounced minority, if we take into account only the white folks. The Boer capital, Pretoria, has a white population of 10,000; the white population of Johannesburg is 50,907; and the great political task and vindictive occupation of the Boers of Pretoria, the political capital of the alleged free country, is that the select few of the 10,000 whites in that town shall rule it and Johannesburg also at their pleasure, and according to the obstinate caprices of their will. There were 50,000 whites in Johannesburg, and the argument the Boer advocates have advanced in America is that the whites of that city, five times as numerous as those of Pretoria, must not be allowed even the shadow of the right of suffrage, because they would outvote the chosen people who have taken the course of government upon themselves in the political capital. It is this insistence upon an atrocious inequality that is the elementary cause of the war. Such an oppression becomes an intolerable condition, and there is no cure for it but the sword. Of course, it has been a characteristic of this situation that it is associated with a systematic tyranny at once insulting and extortionate. The "Dog in the Manger" The Boer policy is moderately described as that of the "dog in the manger." The 50,000 white people of Johannesburg, are disfranchised, first, because they under the rule of the majority would be at least their own rulers and exercising an important influence in the government of Johannesburg, would impair the authority and destroy the prestige of the oligarchy at Pretoria. We do not urge the fact that this majority at Johannesburg are also the creators and possessors of the greater wealth of the Transvaal. Property has the right of recognition as the result of investment and industry, but it is not necessary that to protect itself it must have political advantages out of proportion to the number of the electors who are the property holders. So the argument for the enfranchisement in a reasonable time of the Uitlanders of Johannesburg rests primarily and safely upon the proposition that they could cast a majority vote, and we do not need to call in the merits of the property qualification or the question whether the natives have by possibility any rational right to consideration because about sixty years ago they were crowded out of their hunting grounds by the Boers, seeking a country where they could own labor and assert mastery over all others, instead of being second in importance as a people to the English of lands further South.
The Commerce of the Transvaal
The Johannesburghers are not merely disfranchised; they are, by a vengeful and grasping minority, excluded from the right to protect themselves in persons and property. It is a great fault in them that they did not arm themselves and march to Pretoria to receive and reinforce the Jameson raiders as deliverers. They are justly punished for this sin of omission. The statistician of the United States Treasury Department says: The gold mines are now the most productive in the world, and have already turned out gold to the value of more than $300,000,000, and, according to the estimate of experts, have still $3,500,000,000 'in sight.' The commerce of the South African Republic, while naturally great because of the large number of people employed by the mining industries, cannot be as accurately stated as that of states or divisions whose imports are all received through a given port or ports. Foreign goods for the South African Republic reach it through several ports—Cape Colony, Natal, Lourenco Marquez, and in smaller quantities from other ports on the coast. The total imports of 1897 are estimated at £21,515,000, of which £17,012,000 were from Great Britain, £2,747,000 from the United States, £1,054,226 from Germany, and the remainder from Belgium, Holland and France."
All this does not help the Boer as a politician. He is devoted to the rule of the minority and the exercise of his will in commanding others, native and foreign, black and white, and trampling them into the place he has assigned them. This he calls liberty, and for that sort of liberty he has a portentous passion that he is absolutely sure is sanctified.
Mr. Howard C. Hillegas, in his book "Oom Paul's People," D. Appleton & Co., holds the Boers to be a nation, and his pages are full of highly colored partiality for their cause. The diamond mines, he says, "have yielded more than four hundred million dollars worth of diamonds since the Free State conceded them to England for less than half a million dollars."
He does not condescend to consider the proposition that if the cession had not been made, the find of diamonds would not have occurred, or if it had, and the Boers undertaken to work the mines, their success would have been small in comparison with the remarkable results produced by the Uitlanders.