Having said that, I now come to the Rand.  We must consider the Rand without any bias or prejudice whatever.  The Rand is not a town or city, but a mining district covering 1,600 square miles, whose population of adult males practically balances the whole of the rest of the country.  The Rand population is not, as some people imagine, a foreign population.  The great majority of it is British, and a very large portion of it consists of as good, honest, hard-working men as are to be found in any constituency in this country.  But there are also on the Rand a considerable proportion of Dutch.  Krugersdorp Rural is Dutch, and has always been excluded from the Rand in the discussions that have taken place in South Africa, and included in the “Rest of the Transvaal.”  But in addition to that there are the towns of Fordsburgh, which is half Dutch, and two other suburbs which also have a Dutch population; and it is believed that these will afford seats for members of the Responsible British Party with the support of Het Volk.  I must say further that the British community upon the Rand is divided into four main political parties.  There is the Transvaal Progressive Association, a great and powerful association which arises out of the mining interest.  There is the Responsible Government Association; there is the Transvaal Political Association—­a moderate body standing between the Responsibles and the Progressives—­and there are the labour associations, which are numerous.  There are three main labour associations, or really four—­the Independent Labour Party, the Transvaal Labour League, the Trade and Labour Council of the Witwatersrand, and the Trade and Labour Council of Pretoria.  Why do I bring these facts before the Committee?  I do so because I feel it necessary to show how impossible it is to try to dismiss the problems of this complicated community with a gesture or to solve their difficulties with a phrase, and how unfair it would be to deprive such a community, in which there are at work all the counter-checks and rival forces that we see here in our own political life, of its proper share of representation.

Applying the adult male list in the census of 1904 to the three areas I have spoken of, I should allot thirty-two Members to the Rand, six to Pretoria, and thirty to the rest of the country; or, if you include Krugersdorp Rural in the Rand, it would read thirty-three to the Rand, six to Pretoria, and twenty-nine to the rest of the country.  Arrived at that point, the Committee in South Africa had good hopes, not merely of arriving at a just settlement, but of arriving at an agreement between all the parties.  I am not going to afflict the House with a chronicle of the negotiations which took place.  They were fruitless.  It is enough to say that there were good hopes that if the Progressive complaint, that the adoption of the census of 1904 did not allow for the increase in the population which has taken place since the census was taken, could be met, a general agreement