DISLOYALTY.

Colonist, Volume LVI, Issue 13634, 24 November 1914, Page 2

DISLOYALTY.

(From tho "Natal Witness.") Mr. Beyers, thank God, tio I longer holds the commission of His Majesty the King, and is therefore noi entitled to, and will never again receive from any Britisher, the proud name of "General." The tone and character of Mr. Beyers's statement, justifying, in ' his perverse opinion, the impudent and I insubordinate course he has taken of deserting his post at a time of crisis, is what should make people rub their eyes in amazement, and not the . fact that in circumstances so grave any newspaper, or any people, usually critical towards the Government, should forget their every difference of opinion and close up solidly in their support. Truly and scathingly did Mr.' Smuts remind this man that his incredible A\;ords anfi actions would, in Germany, have caused him to be shot; and we venture to assert that there is not a single decent and loyal subject of the King who would call in question so extreme a punishment being meted out to a man guilty of so unparalleled a' dereliction of duty. Well and truly does Mr. Smuts remind him, also, in emphasising the double-dealing of what he has accomplished, that the very plans he now repudiates, the very actions he in.s\ibordinate]y refuses to perform, were suggested or approved by him in consultation with the • military authorities. Hewas even to have gone to German South-West Africa as soon as Parliament rose; and apparently—

though how iihis could be so requires .- some explanation still—the Govenir ment, up to ;.the last moment, placed its ' implicit confidence in him, and revealed to him the whole plan of campaign. Ho" has betrayed that confidence, utterly and shamelessly.; and not only that, but, with the criminal instinct of the racialist, he has not scrupled at one of the most critical periods in the history of South Africa to re-open every wound which the slow march of time was surely healing. Never before did any man more thoroughly deserve the merciless exposure with which this, the. highest officer of our Citizen Army, has been visited'for his lip-loyalty to the State in fair weather, his base desertion or his post in time of . stress, and his slanderous attacks on the nation to which he owes alliegance by his sacred oat.'?—the whole forming one of the blackest pages in the history of the Empire.