itish population large enough to make a recurrence
of division and disorder impossible."

[Footnote 303: Cd. 626.]

[Sidenote: The irrigation report.]

Apart from its mineral development, Sir William Willcocks points
out,[304] South Africa has remained "strangely stationary. Fifty years
ago it was a pastoral country importing cereals and dairy produce, and
even hay from foreign countries. It is the same to-day. Half a century
ago it needed a farm of 5,000 acres to keep a family in decent
comfort; to-day it needs the same farm of 5,000 acres to keep a single
family in comfort." West of the great Drakenberg range it is an arid,
or semi-arid, region. The reason is not so much that the rainfall is
deficient, as that the rain comes at the wrong time, and is wasted.
What is wanted is water-storage, with irrigation works to spread the
water upon the land when it is needed by the farmer. Nothing short of
the agency of the State will serve to bring about this physical
revolution; for bad legislation must be annulled, and a great
intercolonial system of water-husbandry, comparable to those of India
and Egypt, must be created. Hitherto agriculture, in spite of the
latent possibilities of the country, has scarcely been "attempted";
for, with the exception of the extreme south-western corner of the
Cape Colony, the "conquered territory" of the Orange River Colony, and
the high veld of the Transvaal, the agricultural development of South
Africa "depends entirely on irrigation."

[Footnote 304: Cd. 1,163.]

But, great as was the claim of agriculture, the claim of the gold
industry was at once more immediate and more imperative.

"Valuable as water may be for agricultural purposes," Sir William
Willcocks wrote, "it is a thousand times more valuable for
gold-washing at the Rand mines."

And again:

"The prosperity and well-being of every interest, not only in the
Transvaal, but in South Africa generally, will depend on the
prosperity of the Rand, certainly for the next fifty years.
Though my life has been spent in the execution of irrigation
projects and the furtherance of agricultural prosperity, I feel
that, under the special conditions prevailing in South Africa,
the suggestion of any course other than the obvious one of first
putting the Rand mines on a sound footing as far as their water
supply is concerned, would have constituted me a bigo