onoured discussions over abstract
principles which ought long ago to have been buried and forgotten, let
every patriotic and enlightened man at any rate do his best to sweeten
and mollify the controversy, to extirpate its grosser manifestations,
and to substitute reason for passion.

The grant of responsible government to the Transvaal and Orange River
Colony reacted with amazing rapidity on South African politics as a
whole. It took the Canadian Provinces twenty-seven years (if we reckon
from 1840), and the Australian States forty-five years (if we reckon
from 1855), to reach a Federal Union. Hardly a minute was wasted in
South Africa. Under very able guidance, the scheme was canvassed almost
from the first, and in two years trusted leaders of both races,
representing Natal, Cape Colony, and two newly emancipated
Colonies--men, some of whom had been shooting at one another only five
years before--were sitting at a table together hammering out the details
of a South African Union. Here, indeed, was shown the "practical genius"
which the Government of 1905 had piously invoked for their abortive
Constitution. In the spirit of forbearance, of sympathy, of wise
compromise, which governed the proceedings of this famous Conference,
was to be found the measure of the longing of all parties to extinguish
racialism and make South Africa truly a nation. The Imperial Act
legalizing the arrangements ultimately arrived at by the agreement of
the colonists was passed in 1909. The political system constructed
cannot be called Federal. The framers rejected the Australian model, and
went much beyond the Canadian model in centralizing authority and
diminishing local autonomy; nor can there be any doubt that the
strongest motive behind that policy was that of securing the harmony of
the two white races.

All this was the result of trusting the Dutch in 1906. "We cannot expect
you to trust us, and we shall not trust you," said the despatch of 1905.
We know what the consequences of that policy would have been. It is not
a question of imagination or hypothesis. It is a question of the
operation of certain unchanging laws in the conduct of all white men.
Good or bad, our government would have been detested. We should have
manufactured sedition, lawlessness, and discord. Then the tendency would
have been strong to follow the old Irish precedent, and make the evil
symptoms we had ourselves educed the pretext for tightening the screw of
anti-p