THE TRANSVAAL.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXVIII, Issue 7986, 15 March 1906, Page 7

THE TRANSVAAL.

"ONE VOTE, ONE VALUE." There are probably a great many persona in the community who have been perplexed over the use of the eprxession "one vote, one value" as a definition of one of the nrmciples of representation that have been provided for in the Transvaal Constitution. Enquiries are olten made if the expression is synonymous with "one man, one vote," a» possibly it may be widely supposed to be. The fact is that the expression is somewhat misleading. MANHOOD' SUFFRAGE IN THE TRANSVAAL is, as yet, a quite remote contingency. The franchise provisions of the Constitution, issued last year, confer the right to vote for members of the Legislative Assembly upon all male white British who (1) were "enrolled in the latest list of burghers of the late South African Republic, and were entitled to vote for members of the First Volkßraad," or (2) are occupiers of premises of the value of £IOO or of the annual value of • £lO. or (3)' are in receipt of salary or wages bona fide earned within the colony of £IOO a year. In addition to this, the Constitution provided that each vote should have AN EQUAL ELECTIVE VALUE. This was secured by the decision that, while the Bingle constituency system, with equal electorates, should be adopted, the basis of t/ho numerical equality of the several constituencies should be that of voters and not of population. The object in view in the establishment of this arrangement was never disguised. It was to prevent the possibility of the ' OVER-REPRESENTATION OB' THE BOERS. If population were the basis of representation the effect would be to make one vote on the back veldt equivalent to three or four in the

towns. In such a oase "the child I in arms in the country," said Sir Percy Fitzpatriok, at a recent meeting in Pretoria, in support of the maintenance of the principles embodied in the Constitution, "would rank as equal to the man who worked in the town," and, Mr Leonard, K. 0., said at the same meeting, "the young mnu who camo into the country to makfi it with their bone and sinew would have less voting power than the man who lounged about-the veldt with a wife and fifteen children." The argument, is obvious; the adoDtiou of tho population basis of representation would involve the division of the country districts into electorates which, whatever, the population they carried, would possess a much smaller voting strength I than electorates of equal population in the urban districts, and the centres of the gold mining industries would have. Consequently, THE COUNTRY DISTRICTS WOULD, as compared with tho mining centres be over-represented. By adoption of voters as the basis of representation, however, the country constituencies, which contain the bulk of the Boer population are artificially enlarged and the number of their representatives is cut down to such proportions as reduce to a minimum tho "risk of their forming a majority of the Assembly. It is frankly for this reason that so much importance is attached by the Progressive party in the Transvaal to the principle of "one vote, one value"— the principle that, the equal electoral district, being formed on the basis of the number of voters, each vote shall liave the same value at the parliamentary elections.