THE RAILWAY IN SOUTH AFRICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14145, 21 August 1909, Page 5 (Supplement)

THE RAILWAY IN SOUTH AFRICA.

IT IS REMOVING ANCIENT PREJUDICES.

There is nothing like the "iron horse" for the removal of ancient prejudices, and hie popularity is now secured, even in the most conservative quarters of South Africa, In fact, it is not too much to say that every Dutchman to-day would like to have a railway, not, perhaps, on his own farm, but on his next-door neighbour's. Railways facilitate intercourse, too, between I Boer husbandman and British shopkeeper— J the isolated dweller on the lonely veldt, I who, (is the old saying went, "disliked to bet? the smoke of another man's chimney," and t.its ,-.!•. -!y less self-centred owner of a store in t.i..- 'iti.nl-alive up-country dorp. The friendly tram carries the Dutchman's "landers" gratis to school, picking them up as the patient engine takes a drink at- some wind-swept, sun-bitten crossing, and depositing them, a merry, shouting crowd, at the nearest convenient centre for their daily education on the same benches as the children of the British tradesman or operative. Or, again, it brings out to the wide, breezy spaces of the open country, to some homely red-brick habitation nestling under a kopje, where the buxom vrouw dispenses her coffee and cakes, while "Oom Piet" or '■ Oom Japie" smokes ruminatively upon the stoep, the Scotch bank manager or the English Civil servant, who has been tempted from the town by the prospect of a day's sport with the spring-buck and the guinea-fowl.