Applying the adult male list in the census of 1904 to the three areas
I have spoken of, I should allot thirty-two Members to the Rand, six
to Pretoria, and thirty to the rest of the country; or, if you include
Krugersdorp Rural in the Rand, it would read thirty-three to the Rand,
six to Pretoria, and twenty-nine to the rest of the country. Arrived
at that point, the Committee in South Africa had good hopes, not
merely of arriving at a just settlement, but of arriving at an
agreement between all the parties. I am not going to afflict the House
with a chronicle of the negotiations which took place. They were
fruitless. It is enough to say that there were good hopes that if the
Progressive complaint, that the adoption of the census of 1904 did not
allow for the increase in the population which has taken place since
the census was taken, could be met, a general agreement could be
reached. The Boers, whose belief that we were going to treat them
fairly and justly has been a pleasant feature in the whole of these
negotiations, and will, believe me, be an inestimable factor of value
in the future history of South Africa--the Boers with reluctance and
under pressure, but guided by the Committee, with whom they were on
friendly terms, were willing to agree to a distribution which allotted
one more seat to meet this increase of the population in the
Witwatersrand area, and the proposal then became 33, 6, and 30, or,
including Krugersdorp Rural, 34, 6, 29. The Responsible Party agreed
to that. The Progressives hesitated. The great majority of them
certainly wished to come in and come to a general agreement on those
terms. Certain leaders, however, stood out for one or two or three
seats more, and, although Lord Selborne expressed the opinion that the
arrangement proposed, namely, 33, 6, 30, excluding Krugersdorp Rural,
was a perfectly fair one to the British vote in the Transvaal, those
leaders still remained unconvinced and obdurate, and all hopes of a