Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/624

 200 STATE PAPEES— TBANSVAAL. [1899.

conditions which make it almost impossible for the children of Out- landers to benefit by it. The State system, ipdeed, appears to be more directed to forcing upon the Outlander population the habitual use of the Dutch language than to imparting to them the rudiments of general knowledge.

The law of 1896 dealing with education on the goldfields has, indeed, been claimed as a reform, but it scarcely even pretends to be so, for it leaves the education of non-Dutch speaking children in the hands of the Superintendent of Education, who is not controlled by any local representative authority, and it declares that the spirit and tendency of former legislation is to be strictly adhered to. What that spirit is may be gathered from the provisions in Law No. 8 of 1892, that all teaching must be in Dutch, and that all school books must be written in Dutch, and from the strict limitation imposed by the law on the number of hours in the week in which any living foreign language may be taught. In no standard may they exceed four out of twenty-five, while in the lowest standards none are allowed.

As a matter of fact her Majesty's Government understand that in State-aided schools on the goldfields an increasingly larger proportion of Dutch is required in the higher standards until, in the fourth stand- ard, Dutch is the sole medium of education, with the result that there are only half a dozen schools on the goldfields in receipt of State aid. Yet the Superintendent of Education complained in his Departmental Report for 1896 of the " uneducational and unnational cry for more English."

This grievance, and many others of which the Outlanders complain, would have been very much lessened if the expectations raised by the President's promises to grant a municipality to Johannesburg had been fulfilled, and if the Outlanders of that town had at least been permitted to enjoy the full privileges of local government in reference to purely municipal affairs ; but the law creating the municipality wholly fails to give to the majority of the inhabitants any effective control over their own local affairs. Although the burgher population must form a very small minority of the whole (according to the petitioners only about one twenty-fourth), half the members of the council must under this law be fully enfranchised burghers. The Burgomaster is appointed and paid by the Government. He is bound to submit every regulation of the Town Council to the Executive Council within four days of its passing, which latter body may disallow the regulation. All minutes must be kept in the Dutch language only. The financial powers of the council are restricted, and it is clear that the law is hardly any concession in the way of self-government to Johannesburg.

It will not be out of place here to observe that what was practically a limited form of self-government for the mining industry was strongly recommended by the Government Industrial Commission of 1897, viz., the creation of a board composed of members appointed by the Govern- ment and representatives of the mining industry and commercial firms to supervise the administration of the Liquor Law on the goldfields, the Pass Law, and the law regarding gold thefts, with a special detective force under them. The reasons which moved the commission to make