Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/272

 I saw a statement in a newspaper today that if American miners' wages were paid along the Rand, the mines would show a loss instead of a profit The Transvaal Advertiser of this morning printed a table showing that the gold output of the Rand for February was 734,122 ounces, worth a little more than fifteen and a half million dollars. The same table shows that the average profits of the Rand gold mines amount to $170,000 per day. In South Africa, 184,000 men are employed in the gold mines, 8,000 in the coal mines, and 35,000 in the diamond mines. Practically all these miners are native negroes, so that the negroes are the source of the country's prosperity. The negroes are compelled to work for whatever the whites decide is necessary to keep the country's industries flourishing. In many places here, the blacks outnumber the whites fifty to one, but the blacks must work for whatever wages the whites are willing to pay. If they do not, the whites say the blacks are in rebellion again, and send for British soldiers The Transvaal Leader, the paper I buy every morning for six cents, prints a summary of the news in every issue, and I often remark how little real news there is, considering that the Leader devotes twelve nine-column pages to it. As a matter of fact, there isn't a great deal of real news; the best the newspaper men can do is to make gossip interesting The passion for England here is very marked; the bulk of the reading matter in the Leader seems to be telegrams or correspondence from London. An Englishman will locate in the United States, and at once become an American, but in South