In South Africa

In The Nation, is told the story of a South African Negro girl who left her employment suddenly and departed to her kraal (hut). Her employer, a farmer, drove to the kraal, took the girl back to his farm and there flogged her. But this was not enough. He tied her up by the neck to a beam in a rat-infested barn. An hour later, the girl was found dead: the tips of her fingers had been gnawed off by the rats.

This abominable crime shook the whole Union of South Africa. The farmer was charged with homicide, tried, sentenced to only six months' imprisonment. The moral deduced was that there are two kinds of justice in the Union, one for the white man, one for the black man. Incensed were the Negroes.

At Cape Town, a Negro mass meeting of protest was held. The Chairman said: "We have not got any trust in the white man along either political, educational or religious lines. The salvation of the non-European lies in himself."

But the anger of a part of the white population and the heated indignation of the Negroes meant nothing to the Anglo-Dutch Minister of Justice, one Tielman Roos. Interviewed by a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, he stated his position "with appalling clarity": "Impartial justice does not mean, .that a judge or a magistrate would necessarily give precisely the same sentence to a white man as to a native in a given crime. A very brief sentence of imprisonment to a white man means a great deal more to him than a very much longer term of detention to a native."