AFRICAN SECESSIONISTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 292, 7 December 1920, Page 5

AFRICAN SECESSIONISTS.

GENERAL SMUTS? APPEAL. % CAPETOWN, December G. General Smuts opened the campaign of the new feoutii African party in Pretoria to-day. After giving reasons for recommending the dissolution of Parliament, he said that liis appeal for the formation of a new party had met with a great response from the Moderates of all'parties, who desired to escape from the present dangerous impasse arid secure racial peace and the internal development of the country. He reviewed the question of the Imperial connection, and declared that the secession movement, like a flash of lightning, had made Moderates suddenly realise the dangers ahead threatening the peace and unity of South Africa. He commended the League of Nations and the British Empire unity- movements. He declared that it was nonsense to call the latter movement Imperialism. — (Reuter.)

SINN FEIN CANDIDATES.

(Tieceived 12.30 p.m.) CAPETOWN, December 0. The Nationalists ere making a determined attempt to"" capture tlie Irish Republican vote throughout the Union at the forthcoming general election. They will probably put forward Sinn Feiners as candidates in certain towns. Several branches of the Sinn Fein have been formed recently in the Union and in Rhodesia. — (A. and N.Z. Cable.)

"The South African election, about half a year ago, created an unstable position which could hardly last." cays the Manchester "Guardian." "General Smuts' power stands on a razor's edge with a Parliamentary strength barely equal to that of the Nationalists, theDutch Right; he is dependent on Labour or the Unioniste, or what support he can obtain from both. Three courses were open to him. He might have decided on a second general election, but without some large change in the issue of the preliminary party arrangements the # result, if our own double event of 1910 is any evidence, would have been pretty much the same. He might have tried to find a formula of reconciliation with the stiff-necked Boers under Herzog. and this he recently did without success. He may not have had much hope of compromise with men narrow, zealous, and conservative, 'but the attempt had to bo made if only to show the general body o! Dutch that he had made it before he had recourse to the third expedient, his formal choice of which is now announced. It amounts to the definite splitting and rending of the Dutch as a political body by the formation of a new party, in which the principal constituents would be General Smuts' own South African party, the Unionists, and any moderate men on the fringes of the Nationalist and the Labour forces. The racial division which has marked South African politics is frankly abandoned, and the test becomes devotion to the Union Constitution and aversion from all forms of lawlessness and revolution.