"Treason to the King"

A speaker who could not be arrested preached flat disloyalty to George V and mere lip loyalty to the British Crown before a huge audience at Harrismith in the Union of South Africa, a British Dominion. "We don't accept the King of England," he roared, "but only his Crown!"

Strangely enough this astoundingly incautious orator was not a "Red." He is simply a grizzled South African statesman of Dutch stock who has risen to the highest office in the Dominion. The office is that of "His Majesty's Prime Minister in South Africa," and it is held by General the Honorable James Barry Munnik Hertzog. The speaker first amplified and then qualified his treason-smacking premise thus: "We of South Africa can have done with all kings tomorrow and introduce a measure [in the Dominion Parliament] to abolish kingship; but the English among us would protest and probably many Dutch would support them. The English might even take up weapons and rebel [against the Dominion Government]. . . . I do not think that England and the other Dominions would resort to force. . . .

"We already possess the right to appoint our own Governor-General! I doubt, however, whether the time is ripe for such action. . . ."

"Right" v. "Treason." Whatever the "right" of South Africans, their Governor-General continues to be appointed by His Majesty George V, who sent to that post in 1923 a younger brother of Queen Mary, the Earl of Athlone (TIME, April 30).

Such extravagant speeches as that made by Prime Minister Hertzog, last week, are to be taken with about as much seriousness as the exaggerated platform promises of U. S. statesmen. Naturally General Hertzog's platform must satisfy his large Dutch secessionist following; and, like many another sly old dog, he relies more on his bark than on his bite.

Even so, however, General Hertzog is by far the most secessionist of all the Dominion Prime Ministers; and at the last Dominion Conference (TIME, Nov. 1 to Dec. 6, 1926) it was his bite which finally nipped the British Commonwealth into formal recognition that: 1) The Dominions are nations, with rights to accredit diplomats to non-British countries; 2) Great Britain is on a plane of "equality under the Crown" with the Dominions; 3) Great Britain, while continuing to administer the colonies and the foreign policy of the Empire must now do so in concert with the Dominions, and not with her onetime parental status as "The Mother Country." Clearly these formulae are intentionally so loose and general as to leave enough space in Mother England's cupboard for much harmless rattling of the skeleton called "Treason to the King."