AN AMERICAN VIEW,

Timaru Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 3075, 6 October 1899, Page 3

AN AMERICAN VIEW,

In the July North American Review Mr Sydney Brooks reviews the Transvaal quetaion. Of the Bqera he says: - They have altered little, if at all, since the days when the Dutch JEu3t India Company planted them at the Caps, except to add some vice3 of the nineteenth century to the ignorance of the seventeenth. "In some of the elements of modern civilisation," says Mr Bryce, a witness of inspired impartiality, " they h ive gone back rather than forward." A half-nomad people, of sullen and unsociable temperament, severed from Europe and its influences for over two hundred years, living rudely and contentedly on the vast, arid holdings where their sheep are pastured— each man as far as may be from hia neighbour— disdaining trade, disdaining agriculture, ignorant to an almost inconceivable degree of ignorance, without minic, literature or art, superstitious, grimly religious, th^y are in all things, except courage and atubbornnesa of character, the very antitheais ol the strangera settled among them. The patriarchal Abraham in Wall Htreet would hardly make an odder contrast. The Uitlandera have a greater phare of the intelligence of the country than of ita wealth. They are kept in complete subjection to their bucolic task-masters. They are not allowed to vote, except for a legislative chamber that cannot legislate; they have no voice in the spendingof the money taken from their pocketa ; they see milliona of dollars lavished on the secret servieo and fortifications at Pretoria, while Johannesburg remains a pest-hole ; tl.eir langingß ia prorcribed in the schools and law courts o£ a city where not one man in a thou-und speaks anything but English ; and their children are forced to learn geography and history from Dutch text hooka after passing the elementary standards. It is grotesque to think of Englishmen and ■Americans being truated in this fashion, and it is quite beyond imagination that they should rest passive in su&h a house of bondage.