T HE proceedings at the Boer Congress at Brandfort last week
are worth noting. Though only represen- tatives of the Orange River Colony attended, yet the organisation of the Dutch party is so effective that it speaks with the same voice whether at Brandfort or Heidelberg or Worcester. We may, therefore, take the Brandfort resolutions as the formulated grievances of the Boer against the new Government. On the whole, they give cause for satisfaction. If this is all he has to complain of, then things cannot be very bad,—must be the reflection of most men. It is the same old complaint, which began almost as soon as peace came, and which General Botha in the Transvaal, the Afrikander party in the Cape, and the delegates who recently visited this country have urged with varying degrees of eloquence. The new spokesman is General De Wet, who, we regret to think, seems to have grown tired of the part of Cincinnatus, and to prefer the role of Marius. The Congress deliberately appeals beyond the local Government to public opinion in England, which no doubt it imagines to be more open to persuasion. Let us consider the main points in the Brandfort indict- ment of our government in the new Colonies up to date. In the forefront of the list stands the repatriation grievance. The restoration of the Boers to their homes has been insufficiently carried out, there have been many cases of hardship, funds which should have gone in actual relief have been spent in extravagant administration, and generally speaking (so runs the argument) Clause X. of the Terms of Surrender has been disregarded. Clause X., it will be remembered, provided for representative Repatriation Commissions in each district, a free grant of three millions for war losses to be dispensed by a Judicial Commission, and an indefinite sum in loans. We pointed out at the time the danger of terms, especially in dealing with such a people as the Dutch. They give too many chances to men who have much of the attorney in them to raise a factious cry against the Administration, and they also make the mistakes which are inevitable in all policies take the appearance of breaches of faith. All that has been done in repatriating the Boer would have been done sup- posing no such terms had been agreed upon, and we should have been saved a great deal of ill-informed criticism and apparent ingratitude. The Boer is not ungrateful, but if he gets the idea into his head that a thing is not a gift, but his legal right, he will be brusque enough in exacting it. The trouble of the matter is that the complete fulfilment of the spirit of Clause X. is a sheer impossibility. We proposed to restore the people:to their normal conditions, but we underestimated the magnitude of the task. New and terrible stock diseases appeared in the land ; there were two bad winters in succession ; shortage of labour at the mines dislocated the whole industrial machine of South Africa. The repatriated Boer who could have made a living in ordinary circumstances found it im- possible, even with all the assistance that the Government could give him. It is to the credit of the Government that as distress increased they relaxed the strictness of their rules, and a great deal of assistance was given which was never contemplated at the start. Resident Magistrates and police officers acted as intelligence agents, and. we believe that no case of genuine distress which was not purposely concealed went unrelieved. As a matter of fact, however, the present outcry comes in great measure, not from the really indigent, but from the incorrigibly idle, who are annoyed at the end of repatriation assistance. The same is largely true of the complaints against the Central Judicial Commission. Rejected claimants, many of them dishonest, are quick to cry out, and there is no answer to them ready, since the Commission does not give its reasons for rejection. Until its final Report is published, it must remain an obvious target for the kind of accusations which were made at Brandfort. To the administrative charge, happily, we have a final answer. Not a penny of the £3,000,000 has gone in paying the Repatriation Staff. Their expenses have been wholly provided out of other funds, so that in all some £10,000,000 has been devoted to replacing the Boers on the land. We have not only kept our word, but have gone far beyond it. Our conscience is clear on that score, and our only duty now is to see that no case of real hardship (for the best system will have its hard cases) is allowed to pass unrelieved. The captious and critical spirit in which our gifts are received should not prevent us from fulfilling our whole duty ; but we may regret that we ever made such criticism possible. With one of the Boer complaints we confess to a certain sympathy. They urge that the constabulary should be reorganised on the lines of the old Free State mounted service, and confined to the people of the country. A local levy is indeed the ideal of a police force, and we trust that when the settlement of the country is completed it may be possible to attain some such system. But at the present it is obviously impossible. In a Colony which is largely Dutch, it is unreasonable to expect within three years of war that the police should be recruited solely from the inhabitants. Moreover, the Orange River Colony has a long native frontier, and though Basuto- land is in excellent order, it is only wise to maintain for the present a police force of trained and expert soldiers. With the education complaint, on the other hand, we have no sympathy at all. The two points in the grievance are that teachers are not appointed by local Committees, but by the Government ; and that High Dutch, while it is taught for several hours each week, is not placed on the same level as English. We do not believe that either matter is felt to be a grievance by the Dutch population in general. The agitation is almost entirely a clerical one, though sup- ported by those politicians who are looking for a stick with which to beat the Government. High Dutch is not the language of the people, most of whom know it badly or not at all ; it is the language of the Dutch predikants. The Taal is the home speech of the Boer, and will retain its position, as all such dialects do. The Boer is a very practical person ; he wishes his children taught in school the language most useful to them, and this language is obviously English. But here the predikant intervenes. The language of the Church is Dutch, and he naturally fears lest his power over his flock, as arbitrary as that of a seventeenth-century minister in Scotland, may decline if its special language falls into desuetude. Therefore he starts an agitation, and advocates private schools where he can reign unhampered. Certain European societies, such as the "Christian National Education" organisation of Holland, have assisted him in this work ; but we believe it has little real support among the people. In the Orange River Colony some nine hundred children attend these seminaries, as opposed to twelve thousand eight hundred in the Government schools ; and we under- stand that the proportion is much the same in the Transvaal. A letter in the Times of Monday from a "Free State Burgher," which exposes the clerical tyranny of tho past, is, we believe, indicative of a very strong feeling among the better-class Boers. It is highly im- portant that the facts of the case should be known in this country, for to the ill-informed it may easily appear that on this subject Lord Milner has taken up an arbitrary position. It sounds so reasonable to argue that the language of one section of the community should be given equal rights with the language of the other. The truth is that the real language of the Boer is not, and could not be, taught at all ; the question is between a foreign language and the language of commerce and adminis- tration. If we have erred at all, it is in giving so many hours of instruction in a purely academic tongue.
The Congress wound up with an appeal for self- government. We have often expressed our belief in the desirability of granting representative institutions to the Transvaal, mainly because in that Colony there are certain important and complex questions to be solved in the near future which cannot be adequately settled from home. With so large and independent a British population and such grave responsibilities in view, it is right that the Transvaal should take its place among the self-governing communities of the Empire. We do not see that these considerations hold good in the Orange River Colony. There the Dutch are in a great majority, and though they are in tha main of the best class, yet we see no reason for en- dangering the federal unity of South Africa, which is the ideal of its Governments, by giving a handle to particularism. Self-government in the Orange River Colony is for the present unnecessary, and its creation there would, in our opinion, be artificial and hazardous. We cannot forget the war, or expect the Dutch to forget it, so soon ; and therefore a community in which the majority are opposed to the British Empire, and do not at present desire its welfare, cannot expect, till old animosities are forgotten, to receive self-government. If the Boers had succeeded in conquering Natal, as they tried to do, they certainly would not have immediately endowed its inhabitants with the right of self-government.
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