Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] TUESDAY, 19th FEBRUARY, 1935. SOUTH AFRICAN PROBLEMS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 19 February 1935, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established Over 50 Years.] TUESDAY, 19th FEBRUARY, 1935. SOUTH AFRICAN PROBLEMS.

So far as the course of the Imperial Press Conference at Capetown has run, it has in large measure resembled a summer school of politics. The delegates from Australia and New Zealand, interested, but perhaps a trifle bewildered, have had many things, half guessed at, more fully revealed before them, and have to some extent been enabled to breathe a whiff or two of that rarefied atmosphere which has followed, in one or two places, the promulgation of the Statute of Westminster. “That unequalled instrument of disintegration, ’ ’ as Mr W. M. Hughes has so aptly termed it, has caused little beyond theoretical Speculation in those parts of the Empire which have not troubled to take it very seriously. But there are parts, and South Africa is one of them, where the reactions to it have been marked. Dr. Malan, for example, speaks for the extremist section of the Dutch malcontents when he says that the Union has the power, and should exercise it, of ordering Britain to remove her naval station from the Cape. Not going so far as this group, but possibly hoping in some degree to placate its members, Mr Pirow, the South African Minister for Defence, treated the conference to an extraordinarily outspoken speech. In the course

of this he affected to minimise the value to the Union of the aforesaid naval station, and uttered • a warning that oversea commitments in the shape of war might easily be a very dangerous adventure for a community still racially divided. lie is not the first to perceive this, for the recognition of it was the reason why South Africa was never for a moment expected to take so large a share of the fighting in Europe as her sister dominions did. She had other work nearer home. Commenting on this the “Times” (London) said that “it is perfectly natural that every dominion Government should wish to remain absolutely free to determine its own course in any crisis which may arise.” Viewed as cold theory, such a statement reads as if made concerning countries foreign to one another, and not bound by as much as a pact. To this has the logic of the Westminster Statute brought us—in appearance at any rate. Should ill-will prevail in any quarter, it may bring us still further in fact. Fortunately, however, puzzling as these things have always been to even the most sympathetic foreigner, and nowadays qt times to ourselves, the British Empire, devoid of anything that can be called a Constitution, persists in continuing. Human values are ceaselessly breaking through the shackles of formula.