“As regards the education question, there is not now much need to discuss it. The volksraad during the session of 1896 passed a law in further expansion of the principles laid down in the law of 1892, and under the regulations drawn up in accordance with the law, as now expanded, state schools, in which English-speaking children will be taught in English, and which are placed under the control of representative school boards, have been established in the gold-mining districts. “The franchise question has been made the subject of special complaint. Here, however, there are several difficulties in the way. In the first place, the majority of the foreign population do not want the franchise, because they are quite content with their position as it is and do not want to become—as they would have to do if they exercised the franchise—burghers of the South African Republic. The very agitation over the question has increased the difficulty, for the more there seems to be a possibility of a serious misunderstanding between the Transvaal and Great Britain, the less disposed British subjects become to place themselves in a position which might compel them to fight against their own countrymen. Meantime the government and the volksraad have been compelled to the conclusion that the agitation for the franchise is not genuine—that it has not been encouraged with the view to obtaining a concession, but with the object of establishing a grievance. They have seen, too, that to grant wholesale political privileges to the foreign residents in Johannesburg, even if those foreign residents were willing to become naturalized, would be to a great extent to deliver up the interests of all the dependent classes—the shopkeepers, the miners, the professional men—into the hands of a small group of capitalists, who would use their influence, as they have used it elsewhere, to corrupt the political atmosphere and to subject the interests of every individual to their own. The political tyranny that exists in Kimberley, where employes of De Beers are compelled to vote to order on pain of dismissal, supplies a sufficient illustration of what would happen in Johannesburg if once the financial conspirators secured political control. A further and most significant illustration is supplied by a well-known incident in connection with the revolutionary movement in Johannesburg, when miners under the control of the leading conspirators were ordered to take up arms under penalty of forfeiting their wages. That in the great majority of cases they preferred the latter course is in itself a complete exposure of the hollowness of the whole revolutionary movement. In all known cases of revolution arising from discontent on the part of a mining population it has been the miners who have taken the lead and dragged others in with them. In this case the miners, who had never dreamed of discontent, were ordered to take up arms and refused.