Impressions of South Africa Part 13

The political life of Natal flows in a tranquil current, because the population is not merely small, but also scattered over a relatively wide area, with only two centres of population that rise above the rank of villages. The people, moreover, lead an easy and quiet life. They are fairly well off, occupying large cattle-farms, and with no great inducement to bring a great deal of land under tillage, because the demand for agricultural produce is still comparatively small. Not much over one-fortieth part of the surface is cultivated, of which about two hundred thousand acres are cultivated by Europeans, of course by the hands of coloured labourers. Sugar is raised along the coast, and tea has lately begun to be grown. The Natalians have, perhaps, become the less energetic in developing the natural resources of their country because thrice in their recent history the equable course of development has been disturbed. In 1870 many of the most active spirits were drawn away to the newly-discovered diamond-fields of Kimberley. In 1879 the presence of the large British force collected for the great Zulu war created a sudden demand for all sorts of food-stuffs and forage, which disappeared when the troops were removed; and since 1886 the rapid growth of the Wit.w.a.tersrand gold-fields, besides carrying off the more adventurous spirits, has set so many people speculating in the shares of mining companies that steady industry has seemed a slow and tame affair.

At present not many immigrants come to Natal to settle down as farmers; and the Colony grows but slowly in wealth and population. Nevertheless, its prosperity in the long run seems a.s.sured. It is more favoured by soil and by sky than most parts of Cape Colony. It has an immense resource in its extensive coal-fields. Its ocean trade and railway traffic are increasing. In proximity to these coal-fields it has deposits of iron which will one day support large industrial communities. And its inhabitants are of good, solid stuff, both English, Dutch, and German, for there are many German immigrants. No British Colony can show a population of better quality, and few perhaps one equally good.

Besides the railway question, which is bound up with the problem of the port of Durban and its bar, the question which has most interest for the people of Natal is that of the coloured population, Kafir and Indian.

The Kafirs, mostly of Zulu race, number 460,000, about ten times the whites, who are estimated at 50,000. Nearly all live under tribal law in their own communities, owning some cattle, and tilling patches of land which amount in all to about 320,000 acres. The law of the Colony wisely debars them from the use of European spirits. A few of the children are taught in mission schools,--the only educational machinery provided for them,--and a very few have been converted to Christianity, but the vast majority are little influenced by the whites in any way. They are generally peaceable, and perpetrate few crimes of violence upon whites; but however peaceable they may have shown themselves, their numerical preponderance is disquieting. A Kafir may, by the Governor's gift, obtain the electoral suffrage when he has lived under European law for at least seven years; but it has been bestowed on extremely few, so that in fact the native does not come into politics at all. The Indian immigrants, now reckoned at 50,000, are of two cla.s.ses. Some are coolies, who have been imported from India under indentures binding them to work for a term of years, chiefly on the sugar plantations of the coast. Many of these return at the expiration of the term, but more have remained, and have become artisans in the towns or cultivators of garden patches. The other cla.s.s, less numerous, but better educated and more intelligent, consists (besides some free immigrants of the humbler cla.s.s) of so-called "Arabs"--Mahommedans, chiefly from Bombay and the ports near it, or from Zanzibar--who conduct retail trade, especially with the natives, and sometimes become rich. Clever dealers, and willing to sell for small profits, they have practically cut out the European from business with the native, and thereby incurred his dislike. The number of the Indians who, under the previous franchise law, were acquiring electoral rights had latterly grown so fast that, partly owing to the dislike I have just mentioned, partly to an honest apprehension that the Indian element, as a whole, might become unduly powerful in the electorate, an Act was in 1894 pa.s.sed by the colonial legislature to exclude them from the suffrage. The home government was not quite satisfied with the terms in which this Act was originally framed, but in 1897 approved an amended Act which provides that no persons shall be hereafter admitted to be electors "who (not being of European origin) are natives or descendants in the male line of natives of countries which have not hitherto possessed elective representative inst.i.tutions founded on the parliamentary franchise, unless they first obtain from the Governor in Council an order exempting them from the provisions of this Act." Under this statute the right of suffrage will be withheld from natives of India and other non-European countries, such as China, which have no representative government, though power is reserved for the government to admit specially favoured persons. In 1897 another Act was pa.s.sed (and approved by the home government) which permits the colonial executive to exclude all immigrants who cannot write in European characters a letter applying to be exempted from the provisions of the law. It is intended by this measure to stop the entry of unindentured Indian immigrants of the humbler cla.s.s.

I have referred particularly to this matter because it ill.u.s.trates one of the difficulties which arise wherever a higher and a lower, or a stronger and a weaker, race live together under a democratic government.

To make race or colour or religion a ground of political disability runs counter to what used to be deemed a fundamental principle of democracy, and to what has been made (by recent amendments) a doctrine of the American Const.i.tution. To admit to full political rights, in deference to abstract theory, persons who, whether from deficient education or want of experience as citizens of a free country, are obviously unfit to exercise political power is, or may be, dangerous to any commonwealth.

Some way out of the contradiction has to be found, and the democratic Southern States of the North American Union and the oligarchical Republic of Hawaii (now (1899) annexed to the United States), as well as the South African Colonies, have all been trying to find such a way. The problem has in 1899 presented itself in an acute form to the United States, who having taken hold of the Philippine Isles, perceive the objections to allowing the provisions of their Federal Const.i.tution to have effect there, but have not yet decided how to avoid that result.

Natal, where the whites are in a small minority, now refuses the suffrage to both Indians and Kafirs; while Cape Colony, with a much larger proportion of whites excludes the bulk of her coloured people by the judicious application of an educational and property qualification.

The two Boer Republics deny the supposed democratic principle, and are therefore consistent in denying all political rights to people of colour. The Australian Colonies have taken an even more drastic method.

Most of them forbid the Chinese to enter the country, and admit the dark-skinned Polynesian only as a coolie labourer, to be sent back when his term is complete. France, however, is more indulgent, and in some of her tropical Colonies extends the right of voting, both for local a.s.semblies and for members of the National a.s.sembly in France, to all citizens, without distinction of race or colour.

Maritzburg is a cheerful little place, with an agreeable society, centred in Government House, and composed of diverse elements, for the ministers of state and other officials, the clergy, the judges, and the officers of the garrison, furnish a number, considerable for so small a town, of capable and cultivated men. There are plenty of excursions, the best of which is to the beautiful falls of the Umgeni at Howick, where a stream, large after the rains, leaps over a sheet of basalt into a n.o.ble _cirque_ surrounded by precipices. Pa.s.sing not far from these falls, the railway takes its course northward to the Transvaal border. The line climbs higher and higher, and the country, as one recedes from the sea, grows always drier and more bare. The larger streams flow in channels cut so deep that their water is seldom available for irrigation; but where a rivulet has been led out over level or gently sloping ground, the abundance of the crop bears witness to the richness of the soil and the power of the sun. The country is everywhere hilly, and the scenery, which is sometimes striking, especially along the banks of the Tugela and the Buffalo rivers, would be always picturesque were it not for the bareness of the foregrounds, which seldom present anything except scattered patches of th.o.r.n.y wood to vary the severity of the landscape.

Toward the base of the great Quathlamba or Drakensberg Range, far to the west of the main line of railway, there is some very grand scenery, for the mountains which on the edge of Basutoland rise to a height of 10,000 feet break down toward Natal in tremendous precipices. At the little town of Ladysmith a railway diverges to the Orange Free State, whose frontier here coincides with a high watershed, crossed by only a few pa.s.ses. A considerable coal-field lies near the village appropriately named Newcastle, and there are valuable deposits near the village of Dundee also, whither a branch line which serves the collieries turns off to the east at a spot called Glencoe, south of Newcastle. Travelling steadily to the north, the country seems more and more a wilderness, in which the tiny hamlets come at longer and longer intervals. The ranching-farms are very large,--usually six thousand acres,--so there are few settlers; and the Kafirs are also few, for this high region is cold in winter, and the dry soil does not favour cultivation. At last, as one rounds a corner after a steep ascent, a bold mountain comes into sight, and to the east of it, connecting it with a lower hill, a ridge or neck, pierced by a tunnel. The ridge is Laing's Nek, and the mountain is Majuba Hill, spots famous in South African history as the scenes of the battles of 1881 in the Transvaal War of Independence. Few conflicts in which so small a number of combatants were engaged have so much affected the course of history as these battles; and the interest they still excite justifies a short description of the place.

Laing's Nek, a ridge 5500 feet above the sea and rising rather steeply about 300 feet above its southern base, is close to the Quathlamba watershed, which separates the streams that run south into the Indian Ocean from those which the Vaal on the north carries into the Orange River and so to the Atlantic. It is in fact on the south-eastern edge of that great interior table-land of which I have so often spoken. Across it there ran in 1881, and still runs, the princ.i.p.al road from Natal into the Transvaal Republic,--there was no railway here in 1881,--and by it therefore the British forces that were proceeding from Natal to reconquer the Transvaal after the outbreak of December, 1880, had to advance to relieve the garrisons beleaguered in the latter country.

Accordingly, the Boer levies, numbering about a thousand men, resolved to occupy it, and on January 27 they encamped with their waggons just behind the top of the ridge. The frontier lies five miles farther to the north, at the village of Charleston, so that at the Nek itself they were in the territory of Natal. The British force of about one thousand men, with a few guns, arrived the same day at a point four miles to the south, and pitched their tents on a hillside still called Prospect Camp, under the command of General Sir George Colley, a brave officer, well versed in the history and theory of war, but with little experience of operations in the field. Undervaluing the rude militia opposed to him, he next day attacked their position on the Nek in front; but the British troops, exposed, as they climbed the slope, to a well-directed fire from the Boers, who were in perfect shelter along the top of the ridge, suffered so severely that they had to halt and retire before they could reach the top or even see their antagonists. A monument to Colonel Deane, who led his column up the slope and fell there pierced by a bullet, marks the spot. Three weeks later (after an unfortunate skirmish on the 8th), judging the Nek to be impregnable in front, for his force was small, but noting that it was commanded by the heights of Majuba Hill, which rise 1500 feet above it on the west, the British general determined to seize that point. Majuba is composed of alternate strata of sandstone and shale lying nearly horizontal and capped--as is often the case in these mountains--by a bed of hard igneous rock (a porphyritic greenstone). The top is less than a mile in circ.u.mference, depressed some sixty or seventy feet in the centre, so as to form a sort of saucer-like basin. Here has been built a tiny cemetery, in which some of the British soldiers who were killed lie buried, and hard by on the spot where he fell, is a stone in memory of General Colley. The hill proper is nearly nine hundred feet above its base, and the base about six hundred feet above Laing's Nek, with which it is connected by a gently sloping ridge less than a mile long. It takes an hour's steady walking to reach the summit from the Nek; the latter part of the ascent being steep, with an angle of from twenty to thirty degrees, and here and there escarped into low faces of cliff in which the harder sandstone strata are exposed.

The British general started on the night of Sat.u.r.day, February 26, from Prospect Camp, left two detachments on the way, and reached the top of the hill, after some hard climbing up the steep west side, at 3 A.M., with something over four hundred men. When day broke, at 5 A.M., the Boers below on the Nek were astonished to see British redcoats on the sky-line of the hill high above them, and at first, thinking their position turned, began to inspan their oxen and prepare for a retreat.

Presently, when no artillery played upon them from the hill, and no sign of a hostile movement came from Prospect Camp in front of them to the south, they took heart, and a small party started out, moved along the ridge toward Majuba Hill, and at last, finding themselves still unopposed, began to mount the hill itself. A second party supported this forlorn hope, and kept up a fire upon the hill while the first party climbed the steepest parts. Each set of skirmishers, as they came within range, opened fire at the British above them, who, exposed on the upper slope and along the edge of the top, offered an easy mark, while the Boers, moving along far below, and in places sheltered by the precipitous bits of the slope, where the hard beds of sandstone run in miniature cliffs along the hillside, did not suffer in the least from the irregular shooting which a few of the British tried to direct on them. Thus steadily advancing, and firing as they advanced, the Boers reached at last the edge of the hilltop, where the British had neglected to erect any proper breastworks or shelter, and began to pour in their bullets with still more deadly effect upon the hesitating and already demoralized troops in the saucer-like hollow beneath them. A charge with the bayonet might even then have saved the day. But though the order was given to fix bayonets, the order to charge did not follow. General Colley fell shot through the head, while his forces broke and fled down the steep declivities to the south and west, where many were killed by the Boer fire. The British loss was ninety-two killed, one hundred and thirty-four wounded, and fifty-nine taken prisoners; while the Boers, who have given their number at four hundred and fifty, lost only one man killed and five wounded. No wonder they ascribed their victory to a direct interposition of Providence on their behalf.

The British visitor, to whom this explanation does not commend itself, is stupefied when he sees the spot and hears the tale. Military authorities, however, declare that it is an error to suppose that the occupants of a height have, under circ.u.mstances like those of this fight, the advantage which a height naturally seems to give them. It is, they say, much easier for skirmishers to shoot from below at enemies above, than for those above to pick off skirmishers below; and this fact of course makes still more difference when the attacking force are accustomed to hill-shooting, and the defenders above are not. But allowing for both these causes, the attack could not have succeeded had Laing's Nek been a.s.sailed from the front by the forces at Prospect Camp, and probably would never have been made had the British on the hill taken the offensive early in the day.

We reached the top of the mountain in a dense cloud, which presently broke in a furious thunderstorm, the flash and the crash coming together at the same moment, while the rain quickly turned the bottom of the saucer-like hollow almost into a lake. When the storm cleared away, what a melancholy sight was this little gra.s.sy basin strewn with loose stones, and bearing in its midst the graves of the British dead enclosed within a low wall! A remote and silent place, raised high in air above the vast, bare, brown country which stretched away east, south, and west without a trace of human habitation. A spot less likely to have become the scene of human pa.s.sion, terror and despair can hardly be imagined.

Yet it has taken its place among the most remarkable battlefields in recent history, and its name has lived, and lives to-day, in men's minds as a force of lamentable potency.

Crossing Laing's Nek,--the top of which few future travellers will tread, because the railway pa.s.ses in a tunnel beneath it,--one comes out on the north upon the great rolling plateau which stretches to the Zambesi in one direction and to the Atlantic in another. Four or five miles further, a little beyond the village of Charleston, one leaves Natal and enters the South African Republic; and here is the actual watershed which divides the upper tributaries of the Orange River from the streams which flow to the Indian Ocean. The railway had just been completed at the time of our visit, and though it was not opened for traffic till some weeks later, we were allowed to run over it to the point where it joins the great line from Cape Town to Pretoria. The journey was attended with some risk, for in several places the permanent way had sunk, and in others it had been so insecurely laid that our locomotive and car had to pa.s.s very slowly and cautiously. The country is so spa.r.s.ely peopled that if one did not know it was all taken up in large grazing-farms, one might suppose it still a wilderness. Here and there a few houses are seen, and one place, Heidelberg, rises to the dignity of a small town, being built at the extreme south-eastern end of the great Wit.w.a.tersrand gold-basin, where a piece of good reef is worked, and a mining population has begun to gather. The country is all high, averaging 5000 feet above sea level, and is traversed by ridges which rise some 500 to 1000 feet more. It is also perfectly bare, except for th.o.r.n.y mimosas scattered here and there, with willows fringing the banks of the few streams.

Great is the contrast when, on reaching Elandsfontein, on the main line of railway, one finds one's self suddenly in the midst of the stir and bustle of industrial life. Here are the tall chimneys of engine-houses; here huge heaps of refuse at the shafts of the mines mark the direction across the country of the great gold-reef. Here, for the first time since he quitted the suburbs of Cape Town, the traveller finds himself again surrounded by a dense population, filled with the eagerness, and feeling the strain and stress, of an industrial life like that of the manufacturing communities of Europe or of North America. Fifteen years ago there was hardly a sign of human occupation. The Boer ranchman sent out his native boys to follow the cattle as they wandered hither and thither, seeking scanty pasturage among the stones, and would have been glad to sell for a hundred pounds the land on which Johannesburg now stands, and beneath which some of the richest mines are worked.

The Wit.w.a.tersrand (Whitewatersridge) is a rocky ridge rising from one to two or three hundred feet above the level of the adjoining country and running nearly east and west about thirty miles. Along its southern slope the richest reefs or beds containing gold (except that near the village of Heidelberg) have been found; but the whole gold-basin, in various parts of which payable reefs have been proved to exist and are being worked, is nearly one hundred and thirty miles long by thirty miles wide. It is called a basin because the various out-cropping reefs represent approximately the rim of a basin, and dip to a common centre.

But there are many "faults" which have so changed the positions of the reefs in different places as largely to obliterate the resemblance indicated by the term. It would be impossible to give either a geological account of the district or a practical description of the methods of working without maps and plans and a number of details unsuitable to this book; so I will mention merely a few salient facts, referring the curious reader to the elaborate treatise of Messrs. Hatch and Chalmers published in 1895.

The Rand gold-mining district at present consists of a line of mines both east and west of Johannesburg, along the outcrop of the princ.i.p.al reefs. It is about forty-six miles long, but "gold does not occur continuously in payable quant.i.ties over that extent, the 'pay-ore' being found in irregular patches, and (less frequently) in well-defined 'pay-shoots' similar to those which characterize quartz-veins."[59]

There are also a few scattered mines in other parts of the basin. On this line there are two princ.i.p.al reefs--the Main Reef, with its so-called "leader," a thin bed just outside, and parallel to it, and the South Reef, with several others which are at present of much less importance. The term "reef" means a bed or stratum of rock, and these Rand reefs are beds of a sort of conglomerate, consisting of sandy and clayey matter containing quartz pebbles. The pebbles are mostly small, from the size of a thrush's egg up to that of a goose's egg, and contain no gold. The arenaceous or argillaceous stuff in which they lie embedded is extremely hard, and strongly impregnated with iron, usually in the form of iron pyrites, which binds it together. It is in this stuff, or sandy and ferreous cement, that the gold occurs. The Boers call the conglomerate "_banket_" (accented on the last syllable), which is their name for a kind of sweetmeat, because the pebbles lying in the cement are like almonds in the sugary substance of the sweetmeat. The gold is pretty equably diffused in the form of crystals or (less often) of flakes--crystals of such extremely small size as to be very rarely visible to the naked eye. Here and there, however, the banket is traversed by thin veins of quartz rock, and nuggets, mostly quite small, are occasionally found in this quartz.

The "Main Reef series" consists of several parallel beds of varying size and thickness, which have not been correlated throughout their entire length; at some points two may be workable; at others three. The Main Reef bed varies from one to twenty feet in thickness; its "leader,"

which is richer in gold, from three inches to three feet; and the South Reef, also generally rich, from three inches to six feet. The Main Reef proper, however, is of too low an ore grade to be profitably worked under present economic conditions, though at two or three mines a percentage of it is milled in conjunction with the richer ore from the other beds.

Where these beds come to the surface, they are inclined, or "dip," as geologists say, at an angle of from 60 to 30, and the shafts are now usually sunk to follow the line of dip. But as they are followed down into the earth, the angle diminishes to 30 or 25, and it appears certain that at a still greater depth they will be found to lie nearly horizontal. This fact is extremely important, because it promises to make a much larger part of the beds available than would be the case if they continued to plunge downward at a high angle, since in that case they would soon attain a depth at which mining would be impossible, because the heat would be too great, and probably unprofitable also, because the cost of raising the ore would be extremely heavy. The greatest depth to which workings have been carried is about 2400 feet, but skilled engineers think it possible to work as deep as 5000 feet, though labour becomes more difficult above the temperature of 100 Fahrenheit, which is reached at 3000 feet beneath the surface. No difficulty from temperature has been felt at 2,400 feet, and the water is found to give little trouble; indeed a very experienced engineer (to whose courtesy I am indebted for these facts) tells me that he thinks most of the water comes from the surface, and can be taken up in the upper levels of the mine which is being worked at the depth mentioned. I have given these details in order to show how enormous a ma.s.s of ore remains to be extracted when the deep workings, which are still in their infancy, have been fairly entered upon. But a still more remarkable fact is that the auriferous banket beds appear, so far as they have been followed by deep borings, to retain, as they descend into the earth, not only their average thickness, but also their average mineral quality.

Here is the striking feature of the Rand gold-beds, which makes them, so far as we know, unique in the world.

Everywhere else gold-mining is a comparatively hazardous and uncertain enterprise. Where the metal is found in alluvial deposits, the deposits usually vary much in the percentage of gold to the ton of soil which they yield, and they are usually exhausted in a few years. Where it occurs in veins of quartz-rock (the usual matrix), these veins are generally irregular in their thickness, often coming abruptly to an end as one follows them downward, and still more irregular and uncertain in the percentage of gold to rock. For a few yards your quartz-reef may be extremely rich, and thereafter the so-called "shoot" may stop, and the vein contain so little gold as not to pay the cost of working. But in the Wit.w.a.tersrand basin the precious metal is so uniformly and equally distributed through the auriferous beds that when you have found a payable bed you may calculate with more confidence than you can anywhere else that the high proportion of gold to rock will be maintained throughout the bed, not only in its lateral extension, which can be easily verified, but also as it dips downwards into the bowels of the earth. It is, therefore, not so much the richness of this gold-field--for the percentage of metal to rock is seldom very high, and the cost of working the hard rock and disengaging the metal from the minerals with which it is a.s.sociated are heavy items--as the comparative certainty of return, and the vast quant.i.ty of ore from which that return may be expected, that have made the Rand famous, have drawn to it a great ma.s.s of European capital and a large population, and have made the district the object of political desires, ambition, and contests which transcend South Africa and have threatened to become a part of the game which the great powers of Europe are playing on the chessboard of the world.

It is believed that the banket or conglomerate beds are of marine origin, but it does not follow that the gold was deposited _pari pa.s.su_ with the deposition of the beds, for it may have been--and skilled opinion inclines to this view--carried into the conglomerate seams subsequently to their deposit. In this respect they resemble auriferous veins of quartz, though in these banket reefs the gold-bearing solutions would seem to have come up through the interst.i.tial s.p.a.ces of the conglomerate instead of in the more or less open fissures of the gold-bearing quartz-veins. The chemical conditions under which gold is thus deposited are still conjectural. Gold has long been known to exist in sea-water, in the form of an iodide or a chloride; and one skilful metallurgist at Johannesburg told me that he believed there was as much gold in a cubic mile of sea-water as the whole then annual output of the Rand, that is to say, nearly 8,000,000.

Had these deposits been discovered a century ago, few, if any of them, would have been worth working, because miners did not then possess the necessary means for extracting the gold from its intractable matrix. It is the progress of chemical science which, by inventing new processes, such as the roasting with chlorine, the treatment in vats with cyanide, and the application of electrical currents, has made the working profitable. The expenses of working out the gold per ton of ore sank from 1 15_s._ 5_d._ per ton in 1892 to 1 8_s._ 1_d._ in 1898, while the dividends rose from 8_s._ per ton to 13_s._ 2_d._; and the proportion of gold won which was paid in dividends rose from 19 to 32 per cent. Further improvements in the processes of reduction will doubtless increase the mining area, by making it worth while to develop mines where the percentage of metal to rock is now too small to yield a dividend. Improvements, moreover, tend to accelerate the rate of production, and thereby to shorten the life of the mines; for the more profitable working becomes, the greater is the temptation to work as fast as possible and get out the maximum of ore. The number of stamps at work in milling the ore rose from 3740 in 1896 to 5970 in August, 1899.

The total sum annually paid in dividends, which had in 1892 been 794,464, had in 1898 risen to 4,847,505.

The duration of the mines, as a whole, is therefore a difficult problem, for it involves the question whether many pieces of reef, which are now little worked or not worked at all, will in future be found worth working, owing to cheapened appliances and to a larger yield of gold per ton of rock, in which case the number of mines may be largely increased, and reefs now neglected be opened up when the present ones have been exhausted. The view of the most competent specialists seems to be that, though many of what are now the best properties will probably be worked out in twenty or thirty years, the district, as a whole, may not be exhausted for at least fifty, and possibly even for seventy or eighty, years to come. And the value of the gold to be extracted within those fifty years has been roughly estimated at about 700,000,000, of which at least 200,000,000 will be clear profit, the balance going to pay the cost of extraction. In 1896 the value of the Wit.w.a.tersrand gold output was 7,864,341.[60] In 1898 it was 15,141,376; and in the first eight months of 1899 12,485,032. a.s.suming a production of 15,000,000 a year, this would exhaust the field in about forty-six years; but it is, of course, quite impossible to predict what the future rate of production will be, for that must depend not only on the progress of mechanical and chemical science, but (as we shall presently see) to some extent also upon administrative and even political conditions. In the five years preceding 1896 the production had increased so fast (at the rate of about a million sterling per annum) that, even under the conditions which existed in 1895, every one expected a further increase, and (as already noted), the product of 1898 exceeded 15,000,000. With more favourable economic and administrative conditions it will doubtless for a time go still higher. The South African Republic now stands first among the gold-producing countries, having pa.s.sed the United States, which stands a little behind her, Australasia being a good third, and the Russian Empire a bad fourth. The total annual output of gold for the whole world was in 1898 about 59,617,955.

Among the economic conditions I have referred to, none is more important than the supply and the wages of labour. On the Rand, as in all South African mines of every kind, unskilled manual labour is performed by Kafirs, whites--together with a few half-breeds and Indian coolies--being employed for all operations, whether within the mine or above the ground, which require intelligence and special knowledge.

The number of natives regularly employed was in 1896 47,000, the total employed altogether during the year 70,000. In 1898 these numbers had risen to 67,000 and 88,000 respectively. The average monthly wage of a native was in 1896 3 0_s._ 10_d._ and in 1898 2 9_s._ 9_d._ The number of whites employed was in 1896 7,430 (average monthly wage 24), in 1898 9,476 (average monthly wage 26). Whites would be still more largely employed if they would work harder, but they disdain the more severe kinds of labour, thinking those fit only for Kafirs. The native workmen are of various tribes, Basutos, Zulus, Shanganis, and Zambesi boys being reckoned the best. Most of them come from a distance, some from great distances, and return home when they have saved the sum they need to establish themselves in life. The dream of the mine manager is to cut down the cost of native labour by getting a larger and more regular supply, as well as by obtaining cheaper maize to feed the workmen, for at present, owing to the customs duties on food-stuffs, the cost of maize--nearly all of which is imported--is much higher than it need be.

So white labour might be much cheapened, while still remaining far better paid than in Europe, by a reduction of the customs tariff, which now makes living inordinately dear. Heavy duties are levied on machinery and chemicals; and dynamite is costly, the manufacture of it having been const.i.tuted a monopoly granted to a single person. Of all these things, loud complaints are heard, but perhaps the loudest are directed against the rates of freight levied by the railways, and especially by the Netherlands Company, which owns the lines inside the Transvaal State itself.

Even apart from the question of railway freights, Johannesburg believed in 1895 that better legislation and administration might reduce the cost of production by twenty or thirty per cent., a difference which would of course be rapidly felt in the dividends of the mines that now pay, and which would enable many now unprofitable mines to yield a dividend and many mines to be worked which are now not worth working.[61] However this may be, an examination of the figures I have given will show how great has been the development of the industry during the last eight years, how largely the dividends have grown and how much the cost of production has been reduced. Thus in spite of the difficulties mentioned, the profits made have greatly increased, and the shareholder has fared well.

There is nothing in the natural aspect of the mining belt to distinguish it from the rest of the Transvaal plateau. It is a high, dry, bare, scorched, and windy country, and Johannesburg, its centre, stands in one of the highest, driest, and windiest spots, on the south slope of the Wit.w.a.tersrand ridge, whose top rises some 150 feet above the business quarters. Founded in 1886, the town has now a population exceeding 100,000, more than half of them whites. In 1896 the census (probably very imperfect) showed within a radius of three miles 50,000 whites, 42,000 Kafirs, and 6000 Asiatics. Though it is rapidly pa.s.sing from the stage of shanties and corrugated iron into that of handsome streets lined with tall brick houses, it is still rough and irregular, ill paved, ill lighted, with unbuilt s.p.a.ces scattered about and good houses set down among hovels.

Another element of unloveliness is supplied by the mines themselves, for the chief reefs run quite close to the southern part of the town, and the huge heaps of "waste rock" or refuse and so-called "tailings", the machinery which raises, crushes, and treats the ore, and the tall chimneys of the engine houses, are prominent objects in the suburbs.

There is not much smoke; but to set against this there is a vast deal of dust, plenty from the streets, and still more from the tailings and other heaps of highly comminuted ore-refuse. The streets and roads alternate between mud for the two wet months, and dust in the rest of the year; and in the dry months not only the streets, but the air is full of dust, for there is usually a wind blowing. But for this dust, and for the want of proper drainage and a proper water-supply, the place would be healthy, for the air is dry and bracing. But there had been up to the end of 1895 a good deal of typhoid fever and a great deal of pneumonia, often rapidly fatal. In the latter part of 1896 the mortality was as high as 58 per thousand.[62]

It is a striking contrast to pa.s.s from the business part of the town to the pretty suburb which lies to the north-east under the steep ridge of the Wit.w.a.tersrand, where the wealthier residents have erected charming villas and surrounded them with groves and gardens. Less pretty, but far more striking, is the situation of a few of the outlying country houses which have been built to the north, on the rocky top or along the northern slope of the same ridge. These have a n.o.ble prospect over thirty or forty miles of rolling country to the distant Magaliesberg.

East and west the horizon is closed by long ranges of blue hills, while beneath, some large plantations of trees, and fields cultivated by irrigation, give to the landscape a greenness rare in this arid land.

Standing on this lonely height and looking far away towards the Limpopo and Bechua.n.a.land, it is hard to believe that such a centre of restless and strenuous life as Johannesburg is so near at hand. The prospect is one of the finest in this part of Africa; and it is to be hoped that a tract on these breezy heights will, before building has spread further, be acquired by the town as a public park.

Though in its general aspect Johannesburg comes nearer to one of the new mining cities of Western America than to any place in Europe, yet in many points it is more English than American, as it is far more English than Dutch. Indeed, there is nothing to remind the traveller that he is in a Dutch country except the Dutch names of the streets on some of the street corners. The population--very mixed, for there are Germans, Italians, and French, as well as some natives of India--is practically English-speaking, for next in number to the colonial English and the recent immigrants from Great Britain come the Australians and Americans, who are for all social purposes practically English. It is a busy, eager, restless, pleasure-loving town, making money fast and spending it lavishly, filled from end to end with the fever of mining speculation.

This pursuit concentrates itself in one spot where two of the princ.i.p.al streets meet, and where a part of one of them is inclosed within low chains, so as to make a sort of inclosure, in which those who traffic in gold shares meet to buy and sell. "Between the chains" is the local expression for the mining exchange, or share market, and a sensitive and unstable market it is. It had been "booming" for most of the year, and many stocks stood far too high. But while we were there what is called a "slump" occurred, and it was pretty to study the phenomenon on the countenances between the chains.

The pa.s.sion of the people for sport, and especially for racing, is characteristically English. The gambling-saloon is less conspicuous than in Transatlantic mining-camps, and there are fewer breaches of public order. Decorum is not always maintained. When I was there, a bout of fisticuffs occurred between the ex-head of the town police and his recently appointed successor, and the prowess of the former delighted a large ring of English spectators who gathered round the combatants. But one hears of no shootings at-sight or lynchings; and considering the great number of bad characters who congregate at places of this kind, it was surprising that the excess of crime over other South African towns (in which there is very little crime among the whites) should not have been larger. Partly, perhaps, because the country is far from Europe, the element of mere roughs and rowdies, of scalawags, hoodlums, and larrikins, is smaller than in the mining districts of the Western United States, and the proportion of educated men unusually large. The best society of the place--of course not very numerous--is cultivated and agreeable. It consists of men of English or Anglo-Jewish race--including Cape Colonists and Americans, with a few Germans, mostly of Jewish origin. I should conjecture the English and colonial element to compose seven-tenths of the white population, the American and German about one-tenth each, while Frenchmen and other European nations make up the residue. There are hardly any Boers or Hollanders, except Government officials; and one feels one's self all the time in an English, that is to say, an Anglo-Semitic town. Though there are some 50,000 Kafirs, not many are to be seen about the streets. The Boer farmers of the neighbourhood drive their waggons in every morning, laden with vegetables. But there are so few of the native citizens of the South African Republic resident in this its largest town that the traveller cannot help fancying himself in the Colony; and it was only natural that the English-speaking people, although newcomers, should feel the place to be virtually their own.

Great is the change when one pa.s.ses from the busy Johannesburg to the sleepy Pretoria, the political capital of the country, laid out forty-three years ago, and made the seat of government in 1863. The little town--it has about 12,000 inhabitants, two-thirds of whom are whites--lies in a warm and well watered valley--about thirty miles N.N.E. of Johannesburg. The gum-trees and willows that have grown up swiftly in the gardens and along the avenues embower it; and the views over the valley from the low hills--most of them now (since the middle of 1896) crowned by batteries of cannon--that rise above the suburbs are pleasing. But it has neither the superb panoramic prospect nor the sense of abounding wealth and strenuous life that make Johannesburg striking.

The streets are wide, and after rain so muddy as to be almost impa.s.sable; the houses irregular, yet seldom picturesque. Nothing could be less beautiful than the big Dutch church, which occupies the best situation, in the middle of the market square. There is, however, one stately and even sumptuous building, that which contains the Government Offices and chambers of the legislature. It is said to have cost 200,000. The room in which the Volksraad (_i.e._, the First or chief Volksraad) meets is s.p.a.cious and handsome. It interests the visitor to note that on the right hand of the chair of the presiding officer there is another chair, on the same level, for the President of the Republic, while to the right there are seats for the five members of the Executive Council, and to the left five others for the heads of the administrative departments, though none of these eleven is a member of the Raad.

We had expected to find Pretoria as Dutch as Johannesburg is English.

But although there is a considerable Boer and Hollander population, and one hears Dutch largely spoken, the general aspect of the town is British colonial; and the British-colonial element is conspicuous and influential. Having little trade and no industry, Pretoria exists chiefly as the seat of the administration and of the courts of law. Now the majority of the bar are British-colonials from Cape Colony or England. The large interests involved in the goldfields, and the questions that arise between the companies formed to work them, give abundant scope for litigation, and one whole street, commonly known as the Aasvogelsnest (Vulture's Nest), is filled with their offices. They and the judges, the most distinguished of whom are also either colonial Dutchmen or of British origin, are the most cultivated and (except as regards political power) the leading section of society. It is a real pleasure to the European traveller to meet so many able and well-read men as the bench and bar of Pretoria contain; and he finds it odd that many of them should be excluded from the franchise and most of them regarded with suspicion by the ruling powers. Johannesburg (with its mining environs) has nearly all the industry and wealth, and half the whole white population of the Transvaal--a country, be it remembered, as large as Great Britain. Pretoria and the lonely country to the north, east, and west[63] have the rest of the population and all the power. It is true that Pretoria has also a good deal of the intelligence. But this intelligence is frequently dissociated from political rights.

President Kruger lives in a house which the Republic has presented to him, five minutes' walk from the public offices. It is a long, low cottage, like an Indian bungalow, with nothing to distinguish it from other dwellings. The President has, however, a salary of 7,000 a year, besides an allowance, commonly called "coffee money," to enable him to defray the expenses of hospitality. Just opposite stands the little chapel of the so-called Dopper sect in which he occasionally preaches.

Like the Scotch of former days, the Boers have generally taken more interest in ecclesiastical than in secular politics. A sharp contest has raged among them between the party which desires to be in full communion with the Dutch Reformed Church of Cape Colony and the party which prefers isolation, distrusting (it would seem unjustly) the strict orthodoxy of that church. The Doppers (dippers, _i.e._ Baptists) are still more stringent in their adherence to ancient ways. When I asked for an account of their tenets, I was told that they wore long waistcoats and refused to sing hymns. They are, in fact, old-fas.h.i.+oned Puritans in dogmatic beliefs and social usages, and, as in the case of the more extreme Puritans of the seventeenth century, this theological stringency is accompanied by a firmness of character which has given them a power disproportionate to their numbers.

Quiet as Pretoria is, the echoes of the noisy Rand are heard in it, and the Rand questions occupy men's minds. But outside Pretoria the country is lonely and silent, like all other parts of the Transvaal, except the mining districts. Here and there, at long, intervals, you come upon a cl.u.s.ter of houses--one can hardly call them villages. If it were not for the mines, there would not be one white man to a square mile over the whole Republic.

[Footnote 59: Mr. J. Hays Hammond, the eminent mining engineer, in _North American Review_ for February, 1897.]

[Footnote 60: The total output of the Californian gold deposits up to the end of 1896 was 256,000,000. The total gold output of the Transvaal was in 1898 $78,070,761 (about 16,000,000), that of the United States $65,082,430. I take these and the other recent figures from a report by Mr. Hammond to the Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa Company.]

[Footnote 61: A little French book (_L'Industrie Miniere au Transvaal_, published in 1897), which presents a careful examination of these questions, calculated at about thirty per cent. of the expenditure the savings in production which better legislation and administration might render possible.]

[Footnote 62: There are towns in England where the rate is only 13 per thousand.]

[Footnote 63: There are some mines of gold and coal in other parts, mostly on the east side of the country, with a small industrial population consisting chiefly of recent immigrants.]

CHAPTER XIX

THE ORANGE FREE STATE