Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 2).djvu/169

 men employed in the mines. The other 18,000 natives who are living on their own lands may he eliminated from our present enquiry. Of the 15,000 white persons we will say that a half are men who would be entitled to vote under the present franchise of the Cape Colony. The number would shew a very large proportion of adult males, but a digging population will always have an excessive population of men. But the 12,000 natives would, with a very small deduction on account of women, all be enabled to claim a right to be registered.

The Cape Colony franchise is given to all men with certain qualifications. One qualification, and that the broadest,—is that a man shall be earning wages at the rate of £25 a year and his diet. And he must either have been born a British subject, or born in a Dutch South African territory taken over by the British Government. The latter clause was inserted no doubt with the intention of saving from exclusion any men then still living who might have been born when the Cape of Good Hope was a Dutch Colony; but in justice must be held to include also those born in the Transvaal when the Transvaal was a Dutch Republic. The meaning is that all shall vote, who are otherwise qualified, who have been born English subjects or have become English subjects by annexation from Dutch rule. The majority of the Kafirs now working at the Diamond Fields have been born in the Transvaal; some indeed at Natal, some few in Zululand which is not English, and some few beyond the Limpopo, on native territory which has never been either Dutch or English. But the