Then there were the claims of grievances to individuals. That leads me to enter into a little detail as to the extreme severity with which the Transvaal government carried out their ideal, because it was out of that severity that these grievances to individuals arose. In the first place with regard to the language. There was until quite recently no education provided for by public funds except that which was carried on in the Dutch language. There has been in the last year or two a little concession: some of the elementary schools are open to education given in English up to the fourth standard. After that all must go on in Dutch. That no doubt is an extreme hardship to a population the majority of which do not speak Dutch but English. But there was nothing about education in the convention, and when we treat that as a matter which might arise with any perfectly independent country, it would be absurd to suppose that a foreigner can have a claim to have his language used in schools supported by public money. How long is it in this country that a parent has had a right to have his child taught with public money?
Then, again, with regard to the administration of justice, no doubt the conduct of the Transvaal government has been very bad. No one but a burgher can be employed as a
turns on whether the scanty words in Art. 14 of the Convention of London are to be considered to deal exhaustively with their subject, or whether they must be interpreted by the usage of nations and the general policy which they appear to have been intended to secure, like the similar and no less scantily expressed stipulations in numerous commercial treaties between independent states, that similarity being itself an element in the case. Among the continental international lawyers consulted by the South African Republic there was a general concurrence of opinion in its favour as to both laws. My opinion, for what it was worth, accepted the larger principle of interpretation, but was in favour of the republic only on the admission law, against it on the expulsion law. In the dynamite case the British argument appears to rest on twisting a stipulation for equality between burghers and aliens into the prohibition of a monopoly bearing with equal hardness on both.
