‘Before I come to the other three grievances, I must set right the grossly exaggerated figures which are given in the English Press as affecting the population in the Transvaal.
‘Mr Rhodes, in his cabled letter to the New York _World_, gives them as 100,000 English against 14,000 Boers! Now the
And Uitlanders of all nationalities, 75,720 ------ Of these again are English, 41,275
And of all other nationalities, including those from Cape Colony and Natal, 34,445
‘These figures, which are correct, make the absurdity of the political claim clear, but more clear still if you deduct from the 75,720 Uitlanders the 60,000 who dwell at Johannesburg and its mining district; if you eliminate that one town from the total, you have the Boers numbering ten to one against the Uitlanders throughout the country. And would you have a country ruled in language, franchise and education by one mining town.
‘To prove the correctness of the above statement you have only to consider that there are on the
over 25,000 Boers. Every one of them is married, and most of them have children, the average being over four children, which gives the 150,000 souls.
‘Of these fully two-thirds do not understand English. It is reasonable then to claim that the official language, that official documents, shall be the language spoken by two-thirds of the people, or do the women and children count for nothing? But although the official language by law is Dutch there is not a single Government office in which there is not English or German spoken to those who cannot speak Dutch. In the Courts in the witness-box the judges frequently shut their eyes to the use of the English language, and in the lower Courts English is invariably spoken by English litigants.
‘Also as to the education the manifesto makes gross misstatements. Though the State schools are, of course, Dutch, and the ordinary State-aided schools are Dutch, the
to give to all English schools exactly the same aid as to the latter, provided they will gradually, in the higher classes, introduce the State language, so that in the lowest classes only English is spoken, while in the highest class Dutch is to be the medium. The Germans in Johannesburg have and pay for their own school, the English claim to have their schools, in which, as Mr Lionel Phillips expressed it in his speech, Dutch may be taught, perhaps, if there was a “little time left,” maintained at Government expense.