Beginning of Secession?

Hots wisps of fire & brimstone oratory sulphured the news from Capetown last week. It appeared that South Africa's two greatest statesmen had been pitchforking at each other in Parliament on an issue which vitally concerns the whole Empire: Does Dominion Status include the Right of Secession?

Just back from a visit "up above" which included London and New York former Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts angered and astonished a majority of the Union of South Africa's House of Assembly (Lower House) when he told them without mincing that they cannot secede from the Empire without the consent of Great Britain and every other Dominion. If the Union of South Africa were competent to secede, he warned, then "Ireland would be competent to abolish the Kingship [of George V in Ireland] or to substitute another Royal House, and the result would tend inevitably to the disruption of the Empire.

"We have had the question of secession before us here in South Africa," concluded General Smuts suavely, "but that question has now been eliminated."

"If what you say is right," shouted Minister of Finance N. C. Havenga, white with anger, "this is not the end of secession but it may well be the beginning of it!"

Shouldering his way to Mr. Havenga's side came the Prime Minister, General Hon. James Barry Munnik Hertzog, bitter foe of General Smuts. The Constitution of General Hertzog's violent Nationalist Party used to contain a demand that Great Britain recognize the Right of Secession. This was stricken out only after the Imperial Conference at London in 1926 had invented what is called "Dominion Status"* (TIME, Nov. 1, 1926, et seq.). Returning to Capetown after the Conference, the Prime Minister announced that Dominion Status includes the Right of Secession, and secure in this right South Africanders have been content not to use it. Squaring himself before the House, conscious that there will be another Imperial Conference within a few months at London, General Hertzog fairly roared at General Smuts:

"The Right of Secession of any Dominion is nothing less than the foundation stone, the very test, of its independence and freedom. Any Dominion which gives up its right of secession or acknowledges that it has no right to secede has no right to talk of freedom."

The agitated House then passed an amendment recording that South Africa accepts the Imperial Conference Declaration of 1926 solely in the sense that Dominion Status includes the Right of Secession. Academic though even so acrimonious a debate may seem, it is of burning importance and vital bearing on the Indian question. St. Gandhi has rejected all tentative offers of Dominion Status on the ground that in the form Great Britain would be prepared to offer it to India it would not include the Right of Secession. Therefore he launched his movement for Independence. If South Africa now establishes that all Dominions do and must have the right to secede, then what becomes of Sir John Simon's report and the promises of the Viceroy, both committing Englishmen to the goal of Dominion Status for India? Thus far this mealy-mouthed phrase has been mere pap for Dominions full of local pride but with no real wish to secede -- most Canadians will freely deny that they have the right to do so and all Englishmen will agree. Nobody really knows what "Dominion Status" means, but last week daughter South Africa was trying her best to make it mean something as distasteful and troublesome as possible to Mother Britain.

*Quoth the Conference: "The position and mutual relations of the group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions may be readily defined. They are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status and in no way subordinate one to the other in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations."

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