AND A TAINTED CIVIL SERVICE.

I think thousands of you are satisfied of the venality of many of our public servants.  I wish to guard against the assumption that all public servants are corrupt.  Thank God there are many who are able and honourable men, and it must be gall and wormwood to these men to find the whole tone of the service destroyed, and to have themselves made liable to be included under one general denunciation.  But there can be no health in an administration, and the public morals must be sapped also, when such things as the Smit case, and the recent Stiemens case, go unnoticed and unpunished.

TWO GLARING CASES.

I think it right to state openly what those cases are.  N.J.  Smit is the son of a member of the Government.  He absented himself for months without leave.  He was meantime charged in the newspapers with embezzlement.  He returned, was fined L25 for being absent without leave, and was reinstated in office.  He is now the Mining Commissioner of Klerksdorp.  He has been charged in at least two newspapers—­one of them a Dutch newspaper, Land en Volk, published within a stone’s throw of the Government Office—­with being an ‘unpunished thief,’ and yet the Government have taken no notice of it, nor has he thought fit to bring an action to clear himself.  In the Stiemens case two officials in the Mining Department admitted in the witness-box that they had agreed to further the application of a relative for the grant of a piece of public land at Johannesburg on condition that they were each to receive one quarter of the proceeds.  A third official, the Landdrost of Pretoria, admitted that he had received L300 for his ‘influence’ in furthering the application; yet no notice had been taken by the Government of their scandalous conduct, and sad to say the judges who heard the case did not think it their duty to comment strongly upon the matter.  I have in my possession now a notarial deed which proves that the Railway Commissioner, the Landdrost, and the Commandant of Pretoria are members of a syndicate whose avowed object is, or was, to wrest from the companies their right to the ‘bewaarplaatsen.’  This shows what is going on, and what is the measure of safety of title to property.  Those who should guard our rights are our worst enemies.  In a law introduced by the present Government, the Government, instead of the Courts, are the final judges in cases of disputed elections.  No Election Committees are allowed.  This operates against candidates opposed to the Government, because the Government has virtually a vast standing army of committee men, henchmen, officials being allowed openly to take part in swaying elections, and the Government being in a position, by the distribution of contracts, appointments, purchase of concessions, the expenditure of Secret Service money and otherwise, to bring into existence and maintain a large number of supporters who act as canvassers always on the right side in times of elections.