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Updated: June 10, 2025
Marais and Malan met the Reform Committee in the general committee-room, and both gentlemen addressed the meeting several times, going fully into the grievances complained of by the Uitlanders and explaining very fully the position of the Government and their attitude during the meeting of the Executive Council which they had been called upon to attend.
The total number of burghers of both States is about fifty thousand, and that number is swollen by the addition of non-British Uitlanders who have been induced to take arms by the offer of burghership.
Capitalists had already begun to feel nervous about the final security of their investments; operations and credit became restricted, fresh projects were abandoned and a persistent withdrawal of capital set in. Trade and prosperity were progressively waning, accompanied with still more ominous portents for the Uitlanders' future.
There was a tightening of the lips and a closing of the fingers as if on a sword or rifle, but no one replied to the insolent taunts. For years it had been the hope of the Uitlanders that this would come, and that there would be an end to a position that was well-nigh intolerable.
Such a condition of affairs would obtain under a friendly and more enlightened government, and the only security for the voluntary continuance of such conditions is the enfranchisement of the Uitlander population. In the midst of all that was gloomy unfavourable and unpromising there came to the Uitlanders one bright ray of sunshine. Dr.
Indeed at the end of the Session of 1895, on receiving representations from the business communities of the Republic as to the desirability of removing this incubus from the overtaxed people, the President stated plainly that the Netherlands Railway Concession was a matter of high politics and did not concern any but the burghers of the State, and that he would receive no representations from the Uitlanders on the subject nor would he permit them to discuss it.
It has been asserted by a few Progressive members of the Raad that many of the Boers were themselves opposed to the policy adopted towards the newcomers; but, whilst this may be to some extent true, it is more than questionable whether any of the burghers were willing to concede a share in the power of government, although it is certain that great numbers would not have taken active steps against the Uitlanders but for the invasion by a foreign force.
There was nothing shocking in all this venality to the bulk of the Johannesburg speculator class and others of that category. The rest assessed official morality at a depreciated value, but hoped the blemishes might be purged out with other and graver causes for discontent, if Uitlanders, were only granted some effective representation in public matters.
Their disappointment had been intense at the miserable failure of the Jameson raid, which, however, they felt, and rightly, must some day have a good result, inasmuch as it had brought out the wretched position of the Uitlanders, who, though forming the majority of the population, and the source of all the wealth of the country, and paying all the taxes, were yet treated as an outcast race, and deprived of every right possessed by people of all civilized nations.
The influx of prospectors was very considerable, the increase of the revenue of the State appeared simply colossal; and no sooner did the Boer rulers begin to realize the significance of the Barberton boom than they were confronted with the incomparably greater discoveries of the Witwatersrand. The President did not like the Uitlanders. He made no concealment of the fact.
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