In 1899, it was estimated at £4,087,000. These figures do not include the sale of explosives from 1895 to 1898; the share of licences of claims from 1895 to 1899; nor the Delagoa Bay customs dues paid to the Netherlands Railway for 1898 and 1899.
2.—Budget Assessment of the Burghers.
According to the Staats Almanak, the white population numbers 300,000, of whom 175,000 are males. The number of burghers aged between sixteen and sixty, entitled to vote, is 29,447; that of Uitlanders, between the same ages, 81,000.
These 30,000 Boers who represent the electoral portion of the community, do not pay one-tenth of the revenue of the state. They represent, however, a budget of over four millions of pounds; or, £133 per head. If our 10,800,000 electors in France had a proportionate budget at their disposal, it would amount annually to £1,436,400,000; or considerably more than our whole National Debt.
The burghers are thus fund-holders in receipt, per head, of a yearly income of £133 from the Uitlanders. Never has there been an oligarchy so favoured. It is true that all do not profit in the same proportion. "The Transvaal Republic" says a Dutchman, Mr. C. Hutten, "is administered in the interests of a clique of some three dozen families."[15]
3.—Salaries of Boer Officials.
The salaries of the Transvaal officials amounted, in 1886, to £51,831; in 1898, to £1,080,382; and in 1899, they were estimated at £1,216,394. Salaries amounting to £1,216,394 for 30,000 electors! Such are the figures of the Transvaal Budget.
Here we find undoubtedly a great superiority over other countries; and the officials in receipt of such salaries would look down with profoundest contempt on the much more modest pay of their European colleagues if they knew anything about them. Each elector represents more than £40 of official salaries. At the same rate the pay of the French Government officials would amount annually to about four hundred and thirty-two millions pounds sterling (£432,000,000)! This is not all. In 1897, a member of the Volksraad asked what had become of some £2,400,000 which had been paid over to Transvaal officials, in the form of advances of salary. He received no reply.
4.—The Debit Side of the Boer Budget.
In a pamphlet, by M. Edouard Naville, La Question du Transvaal, and also in the Revue Sud-Africaine of October 22nd, 1899, we find a list showing the expenditure of the Pretoria Government, from which may be gathered the extraordinarily rapid rate of increase: In the fourteen years—1886-99—the budget expenditure amounted to £37,031,000, of which nine-tenths have been defrayed by the gold industry. From information supplied by the Government of Pretoria itself, we find that five sources have absorbed more than half:—