GERMANY'S WHITE ELEPHANT.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 71, 26 March 1910, Page 13

GERMANY'S WHITE ELEPHANT.

Even diamonds do not make everything glitter (writes the Berlin correspondent of the London Telegraph), and the Colonial Secretary (Herr Dernburg) touched upon one or two points in the development of South-West Africa before the Reichstag Budget Committee on 21?t January, which made members of that body shake their heads and look glum. After deducting officials and missionaries, he said, the white population was 8572, but of thes# only 6064 were Germans. Therefore, nearly a third of the entire Civil population was of foreign nationality. But the worst of it was that the tendency was for this proportion to become higher, for whereas the German population had increased during the year by only 493, that of the English had ri«en by 576 and that of the Boers by 117. Another discouraging symptom was that in twelve month* there had been 19,000 prosecutions, and < similar legal proceedings among the white population, or proportionately twenty-one times as many as in Germany. A Centre member urged that attempts should be made to preserve the national character of the colony through schools, but a Socialist retorted that they could not hope to turn Englishmen and Boer.i into Germans by academical means. Great trust is, however, placed in the powers of education, and the Cairo correspondent of the Kolnische Zeiiung plpads that much could be done for, the "German cause" if free instruction in tbe German language were to be given to the natives by the German echoois in ißgypt.