The City of Pretoria and districts : an official handbook describing the social, official, farming, mining, and general progress and possibilities of the administrative capital and surrounding districts

Abstract

The Union Building at Pretoria is now nearing completion. When finished it will be in many respects the most unique building in the country, for in it will be accommodated the hulk of South African officialdom-the Ministers of the country and the advisers of the Ministers; the departmental heads and the technical experts ; the agricultural, the pastoral, the mining, the commercial, the financial, and the political specialists, as well as the hundreds of other officials upon whom the administration and the advancement of the Union so largely depend. The building is worthy of the purpose for which it is intended, and its formal opening will be an occasion of general interest and national importance. Nationally it will signalize a new era of administrative centralization for the better conceiving and diffusing of concerted harmonious policy ; socially it will be the function of the year. Who can be in Pretoria will be there then. Who cannot come will seek to know something of what happens, and something of the place. Pretoria will loom large in the public attention, and to many the reason will not be apparent, for it is, after all, a city with which the country at large is not as well acquainted as should be the case. People generally do not know Pretoria as intimately as it deserves to be known, as intimately as in their own interest they should know it.