What Secession Would Mean.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18107, 24 June 1924, Page 6

What Secession Would Mean.

The election results in South Africa compel us to consider not merely whether secession will now be aimed nt, but what it would mean if it came. Most people will still believe that it is impossible, and will go on in that belief no matter what signs there are that the secessionists arc gaming ground. Such a belief is not a belief at all, of course,, but merely an ardent desire: though it may happen to square with the facts in the end, the fact with which we are confronted at present is that a considerable proportion of South Africans want to be free of Britain altogether, and have a chance at last to work for freedom without any kind of official interference. The Cape "Times" believes that the agrocment between Labour and the Nationalists, though it forbids a vote on secession for five years, will allow the Nationalists to introduce motions in favour of a Kepublic, to make prosecession speeches, to attack the allegiance which all members of Parliament swear to the Crown —and then to resort to some Parliamentary trick in order to avoid a direct vote. If that is intended to be a forecast of what will actually happen it may be wrong, but it is not wrong as an account of what may happen, and the chief reason i for supposing that it will prove wrong

in the first sense is that the realities of independence must begin now to be examined with a new seriousness. When all is said, the Nationalists are not stupid. They may have patriarchal notions on domestic issues, but where international security is concerned they are not blind to the advantages of membership of the British Commonwealth. The total white population of the Union is only a few thousands more than the white population of New Zealand, and even tho remotest veld farmer knows that this is not a big enough garrison for a territory so vast and so exposed. An independent South Africa would offer as easy an entry to Asia as an independent Australia would or an independent New Zealand; and it must not be forgotten that South Africa's Asiatic policy has provoked Asia almost as much as America's. There is also an internal objection to secession which i 3 just as steadying as the thought of a Republic's defcncelessness abroad. South Africa, it has been well said, is "a union but not a unity: like "Ireland, she has an Ulster which is "more. British than Britain herself." That Ulster is Natal, and General Hertzog at least sees that if the Union seceded from the Mother Country nothing but civil war would prevent Natal from seceding from tho Union. Rhodesia, also, on the northern margin is intensely British, while the natives, though simple and ficklo and corruptible, do not forget the change that came with British sovereignty. And there aro the effects that secession would have economically. Thirty years ago the "burghers" did not want outsiders in the country at all. They did not want the mines developed, or industries established, or capitalists in their chosen land for any purpose but to pay taxation. To-day the position has changed. General Hertzog called the election a fight between Nationalism and Capitalism, but that was merely a sop to Labour. He is not stupid enough to suppose that "the larger fields of "labour for the sons and daughters of "South Africa" are open to them without the assistance of British capital.