344 THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



to some of the few farms owned and worked by progressive English 

 and colonial farmers. In the vicinity of Johannesburg a district by 

 no means so fertile as many other parts several farms afford a 

 splendid example of what can be done with the soil. You can see 

 acres of vegetables, orchards of thriving fruit trees, patches of 

 lucerne, and fields of wheat or mealies growing side by side in pro- 

 fusion. You go into the home paddock, as it were, and find sleek 

 cows and fine horses, and near the house itself a big poultry yard full 

 of fine birds. One needs only to turn to the reverse side of the 

 picture to the farm owned by the Boer to learn why the Uitlander 

 so often calls him a lazy good-for-nothing mortal. The writer of this 

 has visited numerous Boer farms in the Transvaal at various times, 

 and though occasionally he has met a semi-progressive farmer who 

 has perhaps gone in for irrigation on a small scale, yet he can, with- 

 out prejudice, state that, in his opinion, the poorest of poor Aus- 

 tralian selectors does three or four timers as much honest work in 

 the day as the ordinary Boer. If it were possible to transfer the 

 selector from his few acres to the Boer's farm and vice versa, where 

 the Boer now lives a life of a nonproducer, the selector would have 

 acres of tilled land and a mob of fat cattle, but the Boer placed on an 

 Australian bush selection would starve in a week. A trip was taken 

 by the writer in May of last year, through one of the most fertile 

 parts of the Transvaal, the Lydenburg district, in the east. The 

 journey was mostly done by coach, two days to the destination and 

 two back. The country was very undulating, with long wide valleys. 

 Not a sign of animal life was to be seen, save here and there a few 

 cattle grazing near a farmhouse; not a sign of agriculture save a 

 few patches mealies in low-lying spots. And yet water was flowing 

 everywhere, the country side abounds in springs, the climatical 

 conditions permit of the growth of any ceraal, and the veld provides 

 natural pasture for countless herds. The coach road at many points 

 leads right past the doors of Boer homesteads, and no matter at what 

 hour of the day the coach drew up at a farm, the head of the family, 

 along with two or three big hulking sons, would stroll out of the 

 house half asleep, where they had been passing many hours of day- 

 light instead of being out on the their land doing an honest day's 

 work. 



"In another part of the high veld, the Heidelberg district, south 

 of the^ Rand gold fields, the writer, as secretary to a gold- mining 

 syndicate, has leased two freehold farms originally purchased from 

 Boer farmers as gold-bearing to a Boer at a rental of 20 each per 

 annum. The extent of each farm is 2,500 acres, and one may judge 

 of the extremely arduous labor of the Boer tenant when the writer 

 states that he has more than once been applied to for a reduction of 

 rent, the tenant professing his inability to make ends meet. His 

 working of the farms consists in allowing several teams of bullocks 



