As regards the Gold Law, an enactment by the late Republic of a war-tax on the gold output of from forty to fifty per cent. has been abolished. The British tax on the mines has been fixed by proclamation at ten per cent. on the profits of each mine. The system of claim licenses—taxation on the possession of mining areas—is continued.
Minor modifications of the details of the Native Pass Law have also been announced, including the restriction of the number of cases, and of the power of magistrates to sentence Kaffirs to the punishment of the lash.
The Law of Military Service appears to remain up to the present unmodified. Indeed, a recent decision in the newly established British High Court of the Transvaal has very rigidly construed a provision of the Gold Law, protecting burghers on commando from liability to pay license dues. The Court refuses to allow to Uitlanders the same privilege as that allowed to burghers in arms. The Uitlander, according to that decision, is liable to pay these arrears accruing during the war to the present British administration.
IV.—PRINCIPLES OF IMPERIAL POLICY—OBSTACLES IN THE WAY OF THEIR BEING CARRIED OUT
Before considering specific suggestions as to actual legislation required in the new Colonies, it is necessary to set clearly before us what are the objects to be aimed at by Imperial statesmen. Most of the errors of the past century of Imperial rule in South Africa are traceable to the fact that no steady and consistent policy has been adopted for any definite period. With every change of government in the United Kingdom the British policy in South Africa altered. As I have written elsewhere, it swung with bewildering inconsistency, according to whether an Imperialist or a Little Englander Government was in power, from an expansionist to a “retrenchment” policy. Alternately negrophilist and anti-Kaffir, alternately conciliatory to the Dutch and aggressively British. “Nothing more fixed than the certainty of Imperial change, unless, indeed, it were the cruelty of Imperial ingratitude.”
I shall take it, then, that consistency is the least we may expect as the result of the late war. The maintenance of the integrity of the world-wide Empire, plainly bound up with the retention of South Africa, involving the possession of the only secure sea-route to Australia and India; the upholding of the banner of European justice and humanity in Africa, the British portion of the mission of the European race the world over—to this end, the fusion of all strains of the European people in a new nationality to form a constituent part of the Empire—these I take to be the objects of Imperial statesmen in the United Kingdom and the Colonies, and of all loyal citizens of the Empire.
Now, these principles being fixed, we have next to consider what are the dangers threatening the successful carrying out of a policy based on these principles.
The first, and most formidable, danger is that arising from the existence in all the Colonies of South Africa of a Separatist party among the Boer section of the population, usually described as the Young Afrikander party. Its origin is due to many historic causes; among which not the least has been the unwise and vacillating policy of the Imperial Government. That party is by no means extinct as a result of the late war. No matter what professions are made in the Land of Diplomatists, it has to be reckoned with for our time and generation. It relies for the ultimate success of its policy of substituting a Boer-ruled independent State for British citizenship of the Empire on many causes. In the first place, the stubborn tenacity of the Boer people, and their slowness to abandon any long-held purpose. Again, on their military skill, their religious fanaticism, their conviction that they are the Lord’s elect, and that His sword will smite not in vain. Yet again, and most of all, on the enormous birth-rate among the Boers—families of twelve sons being not uncommon. Boer ignorance of the power and purpose of the Empire—of the real character of that federation of freemen—figures also in their calculations; and as well the barrier against fusion of the European strains kept up by the use of that patois of the Hollander tongue, the South African Taal. Lastly, their main reliance is on future inefficiency of the Imperial administration—marred by negrophilist British missionaries and English society nepotism and favouritism—on the see-saw of British party politics, and on the prospects of the Empire becoming involved in war with some great European Power.
The next danger is that arising from the presence on the goldfields of the Transvaal of vast agglomerations of cosmopolitan finance owning most of the mineral wealth of the State. On many points, the interest of these groups is not the same as those of the Imperial Government and those of the rank and file of the British settlers. Taxation of the mines for Imperial purposes, such as those of State-aided British immigration and State-constructed irrigation works, cannot be in the interest of the mining groups. The lowering of the wages of the white miners is clearly in their interest; while opposed to the prospects of welfare of British miners and British merchants in the towns, to those of the professional classes, and, above all, to the interests of British agricultural settlers, whose occupation cannot be profitable for many years to come unless their market is at their door. Mining profits remitted to Berlin and Paris, instead of going to the pockets of resident British miners, cannot benefit the British agricultural settler. Again, the truck system, by which employers supply goods to their workers (a system illegal in England), while it may increase the profits of the mining groups, would be destruction of the trade of the British dwellers in the towns. This aspect of the question is rendered more serious by the fact that practically all the press of South Africa is owned or controlled by the financiers of the mining groups.
Lastly, a danger which has existed for generations is that arising from the existence of a body of sentiment in the United Kingdom which, for want of a better word, is called negrophilism. This sentiment is usually voiced by British missionaries, and advocates an impossible black man and brother theory. Its effect on British legislation and administration in South Africa caused the first dissension of moment between Boers and British at the time of the abolition of negro slavery in 1836. The whole theory is felt by all Europeans of South African experience to be based on a flat contradiction of the facts of life and the teaching of the 250 years of European contact with the South African native—Bushman, Hottentot, or Kaffir. Allied with this is the colour-blindness of some Anglo-Indians, who favour the disastrous measure of flooding South Africa with Asiatics from India.