the legislature. And Law 1 of
1897, which according to Mr. Gregorowski made it impossible for any
honourable man to sit upon the Bench, is still upon the Statute Book
and Mr. Gregorowski sits as Chief Justice subject to its provisions.

No one disputes that the position of the High Court as determined by
Law 1 of 1897 is a very unsatisfactory one, but the apologists for
President Kruger frequently say that there has been no actual case of
hardship, and that the Uitlanders are crying out before they are
hurt. They maintain that it was a measure passed under great
provocation for a particular purpose, and that the power granted
under it, although very undesirable in principle, has never been
used. This is incorrect; the power has been used, and injustice has
been suffered. Two cases of actual hardship are those of Brown _v._
Government, the case out of which the whole matter arose, and the
case of the Pretoria Waterworks Company. But there are other cases
too which have never been brought into court having been either
compromised or abandoned because of the hopelessness of the position,
for it is obvious that there would be great reluctance on the part of
business men to make a fight merely for the purpose of showing that
they suffered under a disability when the result of such a fight
would inevitably be to antagonize the only tribunal to which they
could appeal.

The case of the Pretoria Waterworks Company is rather a bad one. The
Government in 1889 gave a contract for the water supply of Pretoria.
It was a permission, but not an exclusive right, to supply the
town from springs on Government ground. The President, finding that
the contractor was not in a position to undertake the work, requested
certain business houses to form a company to acquire this right and
to supply the town with water. After inquiry into the local
conditions and the probable costs, these people represented that
unless they received the exclusive right they would be unable to
undertake the work, as the cost of importing pipes and machinery
transported from Natal by bullock waggon and the then expensive
conditions of working would make the work so costly that at a later
period, after the introduction of railways, it would be possible for
competitors, such for instance as the projected Municipality of
Pretoria, to establish a system of water supply at probably half the
cost of the first one and thus compete to their disadvantage. For
these reaso