the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.
The Song of Songs.



Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native
found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.

The 4,500,000 black South Africans are domiciled as follows:
One and three-quarter millions in Locations and Reserves,
over half a million within municipalities or in urban areas,
and nearly a million as squatters on farms owned by Europeans.
The remainder are employed either on the public roads or railway lines,
or as servants by European farmers, qualifying, that is,
by hard work and saving to start farming on their own account.

A squatter in South Africa is a native who owns some livestock and,
having no land of his own, hires a farm or grazing and ploughing rights
from a landowner, to raise grain for his own use and feed his stock.
Hence, these squatters are hit very hard by an Act which
passed both Houses of Parliament during the session of 1913,
received the signature of the Governor-General on June 16,
was gazetted on June 19, and forthwith came into operation.
It may be here mentioned that on that day Lord Gladstone signed no fewer
than sixteen new Acts of Parliament -- some of them being rather voluminous --
while three days earlier, His Excellency signed another batch of eight,
of which the bulk was beyond the capability of any mortal to read and digest
in four days.

But the great revolutionary change thus wrought by a single stroke of the pen,