"Free" State demands became so persistent that Ministers seemed
to have forgotten the assurances they gave His Majesty's Government in London
regarding the safety of His Majesty's coloured subjects within the Union.
They trampled under foot their own election pledges, made during
the first Union General Election, guaranteeing justice and fair treatment
to the law-abiding Natives.

The campaign, to compass the elimination of the blacks
from the farms, was not at all popular with landowners,
who made huge profits out of the renting of their farms to Natives.
Platform speakers and newspaper writers coined an opprobrious phrase
which designated this letting of farms to Natives as "Kafir-farming",
and attempted to prove that it was almost as immoral as "baby-farming".
But landowners pocketed the annual rents, and showed no inclination
to substitute the less industrious "poor whites" for the more
industrious Natives. Old Baas M----, a typical Dutch landowner
of the "Free" State, having collected his share of the crop of 1912,
addressing a few words of encouragement to his native tenants,
on the subject of expelling the blacks from the farms, said in the Taal:
"How dare any number of men, wearing tall hats and frock coats,
living in Capetown hotels at the expense of other men, order me
to evict my Natives? This is my ground; it cost my money, not Parliament's,
and I will see them banged (barst) before I do it."

It then became evident that the authority of Parliament
would have to be sought to compel the obstinate landowners to
get rid of their Natives. And the compliance of Parliament with this demand
was the greatest Ministerial surrender to the Republican malcontents,
resulting in the introduction and passage of the Natives' Land Act of 1913,
inasmuch as the Act decreed, in the name of His Majesty the King,