It may well be that some day they will try the fortune of one more general revolt before accepting the permanent over-lordship of their conquerors.  Natal lives in apprehension of such a day.  Throughout all South Africa, among both British and Dutch, there is a feeling that Great Britain knows nothing of the native question.

The British people see the native through the softly tinted spectacles of Exeter Hall.  When they have given him a Bible and a breech-cloth they fondly fancy that he has become one of themselves, and urge that he shall enter upon his political rights.  They do not know that to a savage, or a half-civilized black, a ballot-box and a voting-paper are about as comprehensible as a telescope or a pocket camera—­it is just a part of the white man’s magic, containing some particular kind of devil of its own.  The South-Africans think that they understand the native.  And the first tenet of their gospel is that he must be kept in his place.  They have seen the hideous tortures and mutilations inflicted in every native war.  If the native revolts they mean to shoot him into marmalade with machine guns.  Such is their simple creed.  And in this matter they want nothing of what Mr. Merriman recently called the “damnable interference” of the mother country.  But to handle the native question there had to be created a single South-African Government competent to deal with it.

The constitution creates for South Africa a union entirely different from that of the provinces of Canada or the States of the American Republic.  The government is not federal, but unitary.  The provinces become areas of local governments, with local elected councils to administer them, but the South-African Parliament reigns supreme.  It is to know nothing of the nice division of jurisdiction set up by the American constitution and by the British North America Act.  There are, of course, limits to its power.  In the strict sense of legal theory, the omnipotence of the British Parliament, as in the case of Canada, remains unimpaired.  Nor can it alter certain things,—­for example, the native franchise of the Cape, and the equal status of the two languages,—­without a special majority vote.  But in all the ordinary conduct of trade, industry, and economic life, its power is unhampered by constitutional limitations.

The constitution sets up as the government of South Africa a legislature of two houses—­a Senate and a House of Assembly—­and with it an executive of ministers on the customary tenure of cabinet government.  This government, strangely enough, is to inhabit two capitals:  Pretoria as the seat of the Executive Government and Cape Town as the meeting-place of the Parliament.  The experiment is a novel one.  The case of Simla and Calcutta, in each of which the Indian Government does its business, and on the strength of which Lord Curzon has defended the South-African plan, offers no real parallel.  The truth is that in South Africa, as in Australia,