x.-theunionofsouthafrica.docVIP

X. - The Union of South Africa ‘In other countries people and States have usually been most loath to part with one tittle of their independence or individuality, and constitutions have for the most part taken the form of very definite contracts of partnership, setting forth in precise language exactly what each partner surrenders and what he retains. The partners have generally been full of suspicion both of one another and of the new government which they were creating. There is little of this spirit in the South Africa Act. - Hon. R.H. Brand. ‘In South Africa more perhaps than in any other portion of the world, there are common questions of general interest which can only be decided with safety by a general authority expressing the considered judgement of a United South Africa. - H.E. Egerton. ‘The Government of Great Britain has given Constitutions sometimes to willing and sometimes to unwilling and suspicious recipients. But assuredly it has never given its sanction to a constitutional experiment which has been to so great an extent the product of local conditions or that has so well expressed the Colonial will. - Earl Curzon of Kedleston (1909). The Problem in South Africa Parallel with the centripetal movements in Canada and Australia was that in South Africa; but the forces which operated to produce union in South Africa were wholly different from those which had made for federalism in Australia, and scarcely less remote from those which brought about the Dominion of Canada. Nor was the final result by any means identical. The Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth is, as we have seen, typically federal alike in spirit and in form; the Canadian Constitution, though federal in form, bears traces of the unitary ambitions of its more prominent architects; South Africa passed at a single stride from separatism to union. The Native Problem. Yet the problems in South Africa were, and are, in many respects even more complex than those by which t