Evening Post. FRIDAY,AUGUST 16, 1918. SMOULDERING FIRES

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 41, 16 August 1918, Page 6

Evening Post. FRIDAY,AUGUST 16, 1918. SMOULDERING FIRES

The latest news from South Africa provides a very unpleasant contrast both to the magnificent service which the Union rendered to the Empire earlier in the war and to the encouraging aspect which the campaign as a whole has recently assumed. Hitherto South Africa has disappointed the German hopes of disaffection and disintegration as signally as any other part of the Empire. Not only did she suppress the rebellion which German intrigues and German gold had engineered on her own 9011, but she was strong enough to carry the war into the enemy's country, to drive them out of S6uth-West Africa by a campaign of which her Boer Prime Minister took personal charge, to supply another Boer General and more troops for the conquest of German East Africa, and afterwards to let the same distinguished officer and statesman go to England, where he has been a tower of strength and inspiration both in the War Cabinet and on the plaY form. But though South Africa has thus been rendering Imperial service of the highest order far beyond her own frontiers, she is still troubled at home by the smouldering ashes of the conflagration which she extinguished in the first year of the war, and the fear that under the fanning which they continue to receive from astuter malcontents than the rebels of 1914 they may burst into flame once more. General Hertzog is the .leadeV of these malcontents, and the only one of them whose name is familiar outside his native country. If he were less skilled in the use of language which to, a large extent conceals his thoughts and grossly misleads his less educated followers, he ■would be far more worthy of respect and far less dangerous. He assiduously instils into the ears of the narrow,, prejudiced, and ignorant minds of the back-veldt Boers a- gospel of which the only logical outcome is civil war, but all the time he keeps on the right side of the law, and when General Botha rebukes him with an impassioned appeal for peace, he is able to reply that peace is the very thing he wants.

A serious result of General Hertzog's yearning for peace is indicated by the tactics which his party has successfully carried out in the Orange River Colony. Its Central Committee issued a resolution in favour of independence to all branches of the party in this colony, " with instructions that it be moved, together with a no-confidence vote in all the Ministei'Sj at the meetings held in the course of their present tour." At all these meetings the Ministers were received with courtesy and given a fair hearing, but the resolutions were carried everywhere. So far therefore as these meetings may be taken to represent the opinion of the Orange River Colony, that colony has pronounced a want of confidence not merely in the Government— which is mainly a Boer Government—of South Africa, but in the Imperial connection itself. Here at last is some good news for Berlin, after an almost unbroken series of disappointments in South Africa, and in the midst of the gloom produced by the successes of the Allies on the Western front, in which South African troops have played their part as gallantly as any others. After four years of war, the Nationalists of the Orange River Colony have acquired no clearer insight into th« gravity and the significance of its issues, and no deeper gratitude for the privileges that the British Empire freely conferred upon them, and then fought to maintain, than is represented by this series of resolutions declaring for independence, and springing not from freak or impulse, but deliberately engineered from headquarters.

It is of course impossible to argr.e with such an idea. The Boer who thinks that ha can paddle his own canoe in an ocean dominated by dreadnoughts and submarines, or that Germany or any other Power would either respect his independence or secure for him greater privileges than those he now enjoys, is no more to be taken seriously by any aane outsider than a Bolshevik. Unfortunately, however, Boers of this way of thinking have to be taken as seriously in their own country as the Bolshevika in theirs. It was about the beginning of last year that the Nationalists first began to play with the idea of independence. Britain's advocacy of the rights of small nations, in reply to a German Peace Note, was made by the Executive of the Transvaal Nationaliststhe ground for a demand that, in order to rid herself of "the suspicion that hypocritical reservations lie at the root of her demands," she should "immediately restore the independence of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State." The spirit in which this demand was made was illustrated by the attack made about the same time by the Pretoria Nationalist journal upon the Botha Government for helping England " to take away the colonies of a nation with which we are friends." What was then treated lightly as so much "hot air" emitted by politicians and publicists of no standing, has since become something more than a joko. The Nationalist Party appears to have bc6n captured by the. gospel of in<

impendence, though, as wo have r-'.i, General Hevtzog studiously drapes Ha nakedness undsv profusions of peace and loyalty. A ye;iv n-o Sir Thomas Smart!;, the leader, of the Unionist Party, declared that the propaganda had gone frvv enough to demand drastic treatment. "Liberty," he said, "hud degenerated into license. If the law was not strong enough it should be made so." The latest developments are probably inclining General Botha towards the same

conclusion,