candid witness. Mr. Thomas Burt, M.P., writes in 'A Visit to the Transvaal':
'The pay for white unskilled labour on the mines has generally been about 9s. to 10s. per day, while skilled white workers have received from 17s. to 20s.—some of them much more. Now, while 9s. per day would be regarded as a very big wage for an unskilled labourer in England, it is little more than a living wage, even for a single man, in and around Johannesburg. For a married man with a family such a wage is wholly inadequate.'
It is a bachelor white proletariat, then, that Milner is censured for not promoting. Strange, since the censors would have the Chinese coolie wived almost whether he will or no.
We can now sum up on the whole question of Milner's so-called capitalism. 'Hand and glove with capitalists' is the hostile phrase. Hand and glove with the mining industry would express his avowed policy; and we have traced its reasoned grounds. His work for the mines was as much for the miners as for their employers—nay, more, for to him the miners represent the British vote. Against the employers evidence can be quoted out of their own mouths that they would rather not see too big a workman's vote along the Rand; they fear trades unions and labour politics. Milner's preoccupation was obviously something quite different: it was to balance the Boer vote at the poll, and nobody imagines that he counted on doing that with a register of millionaires.
Is it suggested, then, that he should not have taken counsel with the heads of the industry, but rather with the hands? That there is sterling stuff in the British mechanics of South Africa was proved in the war. The engine-drivers and railway hands lived an epic of quiet everyday heroism. But in the ranks of labour in the Transvaal Milner did not find any advanced development either of union or of political leadership. There was a backwardness, which Mr. Burt notices and deplores. I
