I am assuming for the moment that most Conservatives will elect to use the South African parallel in the way that Mr. Long and Lord Selborne have used it, that is, while tacitly approving in retrospect of the Home Rule of 1906, to argue from Union to Union.  But it is of no use to blink the fact that there are pessimists who will put forward an antithetical case, boldly declaring that we were wrong ever to trust the Boers, that racialism is as bad as ever, that General Botha’s loyalty is cant, the Cullinan diamond an insult, and that South Africa will go from bad to worse under a Dutch tyranny.  Party propaganda is quite elastic enough to permit the two opposite views to be used to convince the same electorate at the same election.  Pessimists are always active in these affairs, and they can always produce something in the nature of a plausible case, because it stands to reason that the evils of generations cannot be swept away in a moment, either in South Africa or Ireland.  Miracles do not happen, and the pessimists, who are the curse of Ireland to-day, will be able to demonstrate with ease that the free Ireland of to-morrow will not enter instantaneously upon a millennium.  It is useless to attempt to convert these extremists.  For a century back, Hansard and the columns of daily papers have been full of their unfulfilled jeremiads about Canada, about Australia, and about the very smallest and most tardy attempts to give a little responsibility to the majority of citizens in Ireland.  The vocabulary of impending ruin has been exhausted long ago; there is nothing new to be said.  But those who care to study in a cool temper the course of recent South African politics in the columns of the Times, or, better still, in those of that excellent magazine for the discussion of Imperial affairs, the Round Table, will conclude that extraordinary progress has been made towards racial reunion, and that in this respect no serious peril threatens South Africa.  The settlement, by friendly compromise at the end of the last session, of the very thorny question of language in the education of children, is a good example of what good-will can accomplish under free institutions.  By a laboured construction of fragments of speeches culled from the utterances of exceptionally vehement partisans, it would be still possible to make up a theory of the “disloyalty” of the South African Dutch.  It would have been equally possible for a painstaking British student of the Sydney Bulletin within recent memory to start a panic over the imminent “loss” of Australia.  Some people think that Canada is as good as “lost” now.  Yet the Empire has never been so strong or so united as to-day.

FOOTNOTES: 

[35] Cd. 2479, 1905.

[36] Cd. 2400, 1905.