Necessity has in a way compelled this harmony.  The old issue of Boer independence being dead, new and equally vital issues confronted the South-Africans.  The whites there are scarcely more than a million in number, and they dwell amid many times their number of savage blacks.  They must unite or perish.  Moreover, the folly and expense of maintaining four separate governments for so small a population were obvious.  So was the need of uniform tariffs in a land where all sea-coast towns found their prosperity in forwarding supplies to the rich central mining regions of Kimberley and Johannesburg.  Hence all earnest men of whatever previous opinion came to see the need of union.  And when this union had been accomplished, Lord Gladstone, the British viceroy over South Africa, wisely selected as the fittest man for the land’s first Prime Minister, General Botha.  Botha has sought to unite all interests in the cabinet which he gathered around him.

The clear analysis of the new nation and its situation which follows is reproduced by permission from the American Political Science Review, and is from the pen of Professor Stephen Leacock, head of the department of Political Economy of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.  A distinguished citizen of one great British federation may well be accepted as the ablest commentator on the foundation of another.

On May 31, 1910, the Union of South Africa became an accomplished fact.  The four provinces of Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State (which bears again its old-time name), and the Transvaal are henceforth joined, one might almost say amalgamated, under a single government.  They will bear to the central government of the British Empire the same relation as the other self-governing colonies—­Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, and New Zealand.  The Empire will thus assume the appearance of a central nucleus with four outlying parts corresponding to geographical and racial divisions, and forming in all a ground-plan that seems to invite a renewal of the efforts of the Imperial Federationist.  To the scientific student of government the Union of South Africa is chiefly of interest for the sharp contrast it offers to the federal structure of the American, Canadian, and other systems of similar historical ground.  It represents a reversion from the idea of State rights, and balanced indestructible powers and an attempt at organic union by which the constituent parts are to be more and more merged in the consolidated political unit which they combine to form.

But the Union and its making are of great interest also for the general student of politics and history, concerned rather with the development of a nationality than with the niceties of constitutional law.  From this point of view the Union comes as the close of a century of strife, as the aftermath of a great war, and indicates the consummation, for the first time in history, of what appears as a solid basis of