Throughout the speech there was not the slightest sign of
any conviction that the policy was desirable in itself. The burden of Mr. Lyttelton's speech was, in fact, "We couldn't help ourselves." As for the argument that the Home Government could not set itself against the will of the people of the Transvaal, "it is idle," as the Daily Chronicle observes, " to talk as if the pressure of the mine-owners and the vote of a non-elective Council were the same thing as a clear indica- tion of the general will." As for Mr. Lyttelton's other arguments and allegations, they are in many cases flatly traversed by the analysis of the official Return of the Mines Department given by Mr. Creswell in his speech at Potchef- stroom on October 4th, a copy of which has just reached us. Thus, to take one point only—the cry of "stagnation" and financial crisis—Mr. Creswell shows that, instead of there being stagnation before the Chinese arrived, "the mine-owners kept steadily increasing the stamps at work without Chinese, and kept on getting in more natives. Thus while in June, 1903, they were using 1,350 natives for every 100 stamps at work, they managed from then till June, 1904, to put on an extra 100 stamps (without waiting for any Chinese, mark you) for every 1,085 natives they added to the labour on the 'producing mines, so that by June, 1904, they had added 1,255 stamps to the stamps at work, making at that date 4,755 stamps in operation." As Mr. Creswell shows, accepting the view that this is a purely economic question, "even on this, the lowest ground, they are hopelessly in the wrong."
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