was wholly moral. We have a condition of affairs in which the time
of the meeting of the Volksraad is looked upon as the period of the
greatest danger to our interests, and it is an open secret that a
class of man has sprung up who is in constant attendance upon the
members of the Volksraad, and whose special business appears to be
the 'influencing' of members one way or the other. It is openly
stated that enormous sums of money have been spent, some to produce
illegitimate results, some to guard against fresh attacks upon vested
rights. The Legislature passed an Act solemnly denouncing corruption
in the public service. One man, not an official, was punished under
the law, but nothing has ever been done since to eradicate the evil.

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