Economic Waste. 485 



I think it is possible. We have in this country abundance of 

 unused land, though, I regret to say, little unowned land ; we have 

 abundance of water running away uselessly every year ; we have 

 already a large number of unemployed. Surely here is Economic 

 Waste ! Waste land, waste water, waste labour ; bring the three 

 together, and we shall be a long way on the road towards solving 

 the problem of what to do with our Poor White population, what to 

 do with our out-of-works who have not yet degenerated into hopeless 

 loafers. A few well-considered schemes for conserving water would 

 employ a large amount of labour with comparatively little expense 

 for materials or machinery. It is work that any able-bodied man 

 could do — it is work that even the Poor White who is not yet fit 

 only for the lethal chamber, I believe would do, if you so arranged 

 things that he was not asked to work along with Kaffir labour. I 

 have seen plenty of poor Dutchmen working hard at dam-building 

 with no one but their own sons to help them, and if they will do 

 this on a small dam they would do it on a big one, too. You could 

 justly hold out to them the hope that if they would work honestly at 

 the irrigation works they should have an opportunity of hiring such 

 portion of the land to be eventually irrigated as they could work 

 with their own labour — some small amount of their wages possibly 

 being retained as deferred pay to help them later in starting for 

 themselves as peasant cultivators. Doubtless, in addition to the 

 original cost of the work for conserving water, and the purchase of 

 suitable tracts of ground for irrigation, some expense would have to 

 be incurred in nursing your colony of peasant cultivators for a time, 

 and doubtless it would be a long time before any adequate return 

 could be secured from the capital so invested ; but with wisdom and 

 patience and a proper understanding of the right way to give out 

 such ground, so as to secure a fair return to the cultivator, while 

 securing to the State a fair share of the ultimate benefit, I believe in 

 the end the State would reap a substantial advantage. This ultimate 

 advantage, too, would be quite apart from the immediate benefit of 

 saving our waste labour from steadily deteriorating as vvell as 

 increasing and becoming a terrible incubus on the whole community. 

 Time forbids my saying more about the system of tenure that 

 would be advisable, than that probably a modified " metayer " 

 system, with the State retaining the title to the soil, would be the 

 best. 



There will, of course, be endless objections to this suggestion, 

 which I cannot possibly attempt to answer in this paper, but two 

 difficulties which will rise at once in many people's minds I must 

 deal briefly with. 



The first of these is, What are you going to do with your produce ? 

 Where are your markets for it ? You cannot grow vegetables for 

 Johannesburg or Kimberley unless you are close to the railway line, 

 and if you could, you would only flood these markets and ruin the 

 people who are already supplying them. You cannot grow corn, 

 because it will cost you more to do so on your irrigated lands than 

 you can import it for from abroad ! Granted, but you can do 



