POLICE, JUSTICE, AND LAW ACCORDING TO BOER METHODS.[10]
1.--_Legal and Judicial System of the Transvaal._
In the Transvaal, law is an instrument made use of either to favor or
oppress the individual, according to circumstances. If necessary it is
made retrospective. To provide for the case of judges refusing to apply
such laws, Law I. of 1897 has been passed, which compels them to swear
obedience to the President and gives him the right to dismiss summarily
such as prove insubordinate or lukewarm. The President of the High
Court, Mr. Kotzé, fell under the action of this law, in February, 1898.
Before that law, the President annulled any judgments that displeased
him and caused the fines or damages inflicted upon the delinquents to be
paid out of the public Treasury.
Such is judicial and legal rule in the Transvaal; and there are European
lawyers of the opinion that the Uitlanders must be the most contemptible
and lowest set of adventurers for not being satisfied with it! Dr.
Kuyper declares that "the factitious discontent existed only among the
English"; and adds with contempt, "Let us look into the Edgar,
Lombaard, and Amphitheatre cases--mere police affairs."
Well; let us consider Mr. Krüger's interpretation of the duties of the
police.
[Footnote 10: _Le Siècle,_ March 30th, 1900.]
2.--_The Police._
The chief of the departments of justice and police is called the State
Attorney.
In 1895, when Mr. Esselen was promoted to the post, he stipulated that
he should have full liberty of action. As chief detective officer he
appointed an officer belonging to the Cape Administration, Mr. Andrew
Trimble, who entered upon his duties with vigour and determination. The
gold thieves and receivers and the illicit canteen keepers who supplied
the natives with liquor were up in arms at once and appealed to
President Krüger. They represented Trimble as having served in the
English Army, and as being in receipt of a pension from the Cape
Government, further stating that his appointment was an insult to the
Boers, who had been thus judged unworthy to provide from among
themselves a Head of Police. Mr. Esselen, who stood his ground, was
dismissed and replaced by a Hollander, Dr. Coster. Mr. Trimble, chief of
the detective force, was replaced by a man who had previously been
dismissed, and has since been dismissed again.
As it was useless to depend upon the police for the arrest of thieves,
the directors and officials of the _City and Suburban Gold Mining
Company_ took upon themselves the risks and dangers of police work. They
caught two notorious characters, known thieves, with gold in their
possession. The thieves openly boasted that nothing would be done to
them; the next day, one was allowed to escape, the other, a notorious
criminal, was condemned to six months' imprisonment. Mr. Krüger regarded
this penalty as excessive, remitted three-fourths of the sentence, and
had him discharged unconditionally.
The police of Johannesburg, a town almost entirely inhabited by English,
do not speak English--an excellent method of ensuring order! They are
chosen from among the worst types of Boers, some of whom are the
descendants of English deserters and Kaffir women; whence comes the fact
that some bear English names. The policeman Jones, who killed Edgar, is
a case in point.
The murder of Edgar was a small matter in the same way as the Dreyfus
case was a small matter; only when a case of this nature arises, it
reveals a condition of things so grave that it excites widespread
feeling at once.
Edgar was an English workman, a boilermaker, who had been a long time in
Johannesburg; a well-conducted man and generally respected. He was going
home, one Sunday night in 1898, when three drunken men insulted and set
upon him. He knocked one of them down. The other two called the police.
Edgar, meanwhile, entered his own house. Four policemen broke open his
door, and the instant Edgar came out into the passage, Policeman Jones
shot him dead with a revolver. "A mere police row," says Dr. Kuyper.
Jones was arrested next morning, but straightway released upon a bail of
£200. The money was not even paid in, but carried over to be deducted
monthly from the future salaries of other members of the Johannesburg
police force.
Feeling was strong among the other English workmen, many of whom knew
Edgar; and this feeling was intensified by the subsequent parody of
justice.
3.--_An Ingenious Collusion._
The State Attorney, Mr. Smuts, informed the Acting British Agent, Mr.
Fraser, that it would be better to bring a charge against Policeman
Jones, for "culpable homicide" than for murder, but that he considered
the chance of his conviction by a Boer jury to be very small. The word
"culpable," says Webster (English Dictionary) is "applied to acts which
have not the gravity of crime." In this instance, it made Jones' action
excusable on the grounds that Edgar struck him with a stick, at the
moment of his entering the house.
A journalist, Mr. J.S. Dunn, Editor of _The Critic_, commented upon the
action of Dr. Krause, the First Public Prosecutor. Dr. Krause took
criminal action against Mr. Dunn for libel, and, before proceeding with
the murder trial, appeared as witness in his own case, and swore that he
did not consider that Jones had been guilty of murder; he not only made
this statement on oath, but called the Second Public Prosecutor who gave
similar evidence. Nor was this all. He brought forward the accused
himself, as witness to state that the First Public Prosecutor was right
in not committing him for murder!
When this ghastly farce had been performed, which is much on a footing
with the examination of Esterhazy by Pellieux, the murderer was free to
present himself confidently before a Boer jury. Not only was he
acquitted, but the presiding judge, Kock, who had claimed a judgeship as
a "son of the soil," in pronouncing judgment added this little speech:
"I hope that this verdict will show the police how to do their duty."
This amiable conclusion did not seem very re-assuring to the Uitlanders.
At the same time Mr. Krüger suppressed two newspapers, _The Critic_ and
_The Star_. (See Blue Book C. 9, 345.)
4.--_The Lombaard Case._
Dr. Kuyper states that Edgar was in the wrong, that Jones acted within
his rights, that the Public Prosecutor and the jury fulfilled their
duty. As for Lombaard, "he too," Dr. Kuyper tells us, "was a
Johannesburg policeman, and like Jones a little rough in his mode of
action".... "He committed no outrage; the sole reproach attaching to him
was that he conducted his search at night, and without a special
warrant." And Dr. Kuyper is very contemptuous of any who may be disposed
to question such proceedings.
The truth is, that Lombaard, at the head of sixteen or eighteen police,
had taken upon himself, without warrant, to enter the houses of coloured
British subjects, men and women, to demand their passes; to send them to
prison whether right or wrong; to ill-treat and flog them. A mere
trifle; scarce worth talking about; they were only people of colour, and
Dr. Kuyper has told us his ideas on that subject.
The Edgar case was the origin of the petition of the 21,000 Uitlanders
to the English Government, to ask the protection it had undertaken to
extend to them under the Convention of 1884.
The facts which I have given in _Le Siècle_ of the 29th March, and those
I now give here, are sufficient to prove that under Mr. Krüger's
Government, police, justice and law do not exist in the Transvaal.