Settlement in New South Wales, to take one instance, was begun partly as a Treasury expedient and partly as an election cry. Under the Act of 1867 a settler was allowed to peg off, as on a mining area, a claim not exceeding 320 acres, without any attempt at a previous valuation and survey. The result was a wild rush, where nobody benefited except the blackmailer, who seized the strategic points of the country, such as water-holes, and had to be bought out at a fancy price. It does not surprise one to learn that of settlers under this scheme not one in twenty remains to-day. By subsequent Acts the maximum acreage was increased; but in any case it was an arbitrary figure, and it was not till 1895 that it was left within the widest limits to the discretion of the Minister of Lands. Areas proved too small, since no provision could be made for the increase of stock and the necessary fall in prices which attended settlement. In valuation the extraordinary plan was adopted of giving a uniform capital value of £1 per acre to all land. The country being unproved, values were absolutely unknown, nor was any provision made for revaluation. The result was that the settler struggled along till he was ruined and his holding forfeited, when the holding lapsed to the State, which, being unable to find a new tenant, was compelled to let it remain vacant, having accomplished nothing but the needless ruin of the first man. The “Settlers’ Ordinance” has endeavoured to avoid laying down any rules which experience has not tried and tested. The determination of the size of any holding is left to the land officials, without defining any area limits. A holding which proves too small may be increased on appeal, and the boundaries are at all times made capable of adjustment. Holdings are first surveyed and valued, then gazetted for application, and finally publicly allotted, after full inquiry into the case of each applicant, by a Central Board. The division and valuation of farms, in the absence of reliable data, is a work of great nicety and difficulty. The country contains within its limits many districts which differ widely in soil, vegetation, and climate. It is therefore impossible, in deciding on the size of holdings, to follow any arbitrary rule; and to restrict survey to a maximum and minimum acreage would be fatal. The only method is to ascertain from local evidence the carrying and producing capacity of similar land, and so frame the boundaries of a farm as to provide on such figures a reasonably good living for the class of settler for whom it is intended. The danger of putting too high a price on land is not less great. If the current market price is taken it will in most instances be overvalued, and in any case it is a method without any justification in reason. The best solution is probably the plan at present in use. Schedules have been prepared for the different types of holding, in which the profits are calculated, using as a guide the present price of stock and imported produce at the coast to ensure against the inevitable fall in prices. Taking such estimated profits as a basis, the valuation is so fixed as to give the settler, after all living expenses, annual payments to Government, probable loss of stock, and depreciation of plant have been written off, a clear profit of 12 per cent on his original capital. From this figure some further deductions may fall to be made for such disadvantages as unhealthiness of climate and excessive distance from the conveniences of civilised life. In the absence of more scientific data this seems to form as fair a basis in valuation as any man can expect.
But if early Australasian legislation erred in rigour, it also erred in laxity. The settler was often the nominee of a syndicate or a large run-holder, and before the 1895 Act a class of professional selectors existed. This system of latifundia brought its own punishment. The run-holder ruined the small selector. To pay the instalments on his many selections he had recourse to the banks, which speedily ruined him and took over his holdings. The banks in their turn ruined themselves, chiefly through being obliged to pay instalments on land valued at £1 per acre, of which the actual value for stock was less than 5s. Again, the settler was compelled to improve the land at the rate of so many shillings per acre within a given time. This led to cheap fictitious improvements by which the letter of the law was satisfied and the spirit evaded. The “Settlers’ Ordinance” has certain stringent provisions to prevent such frustration of the true aims of settlement. Subletting or transfer of any sort, except with Government consent, is strictly forbidden till the tenant has acquired the freehold. Residence for at least eight months in the year, unless a special dispensation is granted, is required during the same period. The settler is compelled to build a satisfactory house and to fence his holding within a given time. He is compelled to occupy it solely for his own benefit, to cultivate according to the rules of good husbandry (whatever that may mean), and the decision of the local Land Commissioner is the test by which he is judged. He is encouraged to improve by the potent fact that the Government will advance pound for pound against his improvements. But there are certain elastic provisions to temper the rigour of such restrictions. The Commissioner of Lands is given a very wide dispensing power with regard to most conditions. Partnerships are allowed; settlers may reside together in a village community; and the residence conditions may be temporarily fulfilled by a wife or child, to allow a settler in hard times to make money by his labour elsewhere. Special relief is provided during periods of disease or drought by the cessation or diminution of the annual payments, and by advances in excess of the ordinary limits.
The Ordinance has been framed on experimental lines, leaving much to the discretion of local officials (subject to an appeal to the Central Board and thence to the High Court), and hesitating to dogmatise on details which are still unproved. But in spite of much which is empirical, one or two root principles are maintained. One is that a fair chance must be given to all to acquire the freehold, without which magic possibility the best men will not come forward. Another, and perhaps the most important of all, is that the payments to Government shall be so arranged as to be scarcely felt during the early years when they are paid out of capital, and to rise to any considerable sum only when the holding is producing a revenue. The two chief forms of tenure are leasehold and purchase by instalments over a period of thirty years. The common form of lease is for five years, with a possible extension for another two, and the rental may be at any rate (not exceeding 5 per cent) which the Commissioner of Lands thinks suitable. This method will enable back-country to be taken up, to start with, at a nominal rent; and it will also allow a settler on an unimproved stock-farm to devote the bulk of his capital to the necessary stocking and improvements. At the end of the lease, or without any preliminary lease, the settler can begin to purchase his holding on the instalments system. By a payment of £5, 15s. per cent per annum on the gazetted valuation, principal and interest (which is calculated at 4 per cent) will be wiped off in thirty years. But a settler is permitted any time after ten years from the date of his first occupation to pay up the balance and acquire the full freehold. In the case of preliminary leaseholders who take up a purchase licence, the licence, so far as the ten years’ period is concerned, is made retrospective so as to date from the first day of the lease.
Such is a rough outline of the Government proposals. They aim only at making a beginning, and it is to the large private owner and the land company that we must look for the completion of the work. South African agriculture can never be a Golconda like the Canadian wheat-lands of the West. But it is of inestimable value to the country in providing a background to the immense temporary mining development—a permanent asset, which will remain to South Africa’s credit when the gold-mines of the Rand are curiosities of history. In itself it is a sound investment, offering no glittering fortunes but a steady and reasonable livelihood. No people can afford to develop solely on industrial lines and remain a nation in the full sense of the word, for in every commonwealth there is need of the rural forces of persistence to counteract the urban forces of change. All settlement is necessarily a leap in the dark, but, so far as a proposal can be judged before it is put into practice, the present scheme offers good chances of success. There seems little doubt that it will receive full justice. The war spread the knowledge of the country to every cranny of the Empire. English and Scottish farmers’ sons, Australian bushmen, Indian planters, farmers from New Zealand and Ontario, having fought for three years on the veld, have fallen in love with it and are willing to make it their home. No more splendid chances for settlement have ever offered; for when the wastrels have been eliminated there remain many thousands of good men, from whom a sturdy country stock could be created. There can be no indiscriminate gifts of land as in some colonies. The land is too valuable, the political purpose too delicate and urgent, the need of nice discrimination in selection and careful fostering thereafter too imperative, to allow farms to be shaken up in a lucky-bag and distributed to the first comers. The best men must be attracted, and assisted with advice and loans to the measure of success which is possible. It is the soundest form of political speculation, if done with sober and clear-sighted purpose. The young men from home and the colonies, to whom South Africa is a memory that can never die, turn naturally towards it in search of a freer life and a larger prospect. On the model farms which are being established in each district the proverbial “younger sons of younger sons” will be given a chance of learning the requirements of the land, and so starting work on their own account with intelligence and economy. Some day—and may we all live to see it!—there will be little white homesteads among trees, and country villages and moorland farms; cattle and sheep on a thousand hills where now only the wild birds cry; wayside inns where the thirsty traveller can find refreshment; and country shows where John Smith and Johannes Smuts will compete amicably for the King’s premiums. And if any one thinks this an unfounded hope, let him turn to some such book as Ogilby’s ‘Itinerarium Angliæ,’ where he will find that in the closing years of the seventeenth century the arable and pastoral land in England scarcely amounted to half the area of the kingdom, and the most fruitful orchards of Gloucestershire and Warwick were mere heath and swamp, and, as it seemed to an acute observer, doomed to remain so.
Settlement, indeed, is but one, though the most important, of the land problems. An enlightened agricultural department, working in conjunction with local societies, can do much to unite the two races by conferring benefits which are common to both. The introduction of pedigree stock to grade up the existing herds is a necessity which any Boer farmer will admit. So, too, are stringent regulations for the prevention of disease, experiments in new crops, field trials of new machinery, and a provision for some form of agricultural training. Central creameries and tobacco-factories would work wonders in increasing the prosperity of certain districts. Something of that tireless vigilance and alert intelligence which has made the Agricultural Bureau of the United States famous, a spirit which brings into agriculture the procedure and the exact calculation of a great business house, is necessary to meet the not insuperable difficulties which now deter the timid, and to give farming a chance of development commensurate with its political importance. It is only another case in which a South African question stands on a razor-edge, a narrow line separating ample success from a melancholy failure.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE SUBJECT RACES.
No question is more fraught with difficulties for the home philosopher than this, but there is none on which practical men have made up their mind with such bitter completeness. The root of the trouble is that England and South Africa talk, and will continue to talk, in different languages on the matter. The Englishman, using the speech of conventional politics, seems to the colonist to talk academic nonsense; while the South African, speaking the rough and ready words of the practical man, appears as the champion of brutality and coercion. The difficulties are so real that one cannot but regret that they are complicated by verbal misunderstandings. There is no real divergence of views on the native question: the distinction is rather between a seriously held opinion and a slipshod prejudice. “Exeter Hall” is less the name of a party than of an attitude, as common among the robust colonists as ever it was among the mild pietists of Clapham. It consists in a disinclination to look simply on facts, to reason soberly, and to speak accurately,—a tendency to lap a question in turgid emotion. The man who consigns all native races to perdition in round terms, and declares that the only solution of the difficulty is to clear out the Kaffir, is as truly a votary of Exeter Hall as the gentle old lady to whom the aborigine is a model of primeval innocence, whose only joy is the singing of missionary hymns.