"So Ends Our Senate"

By a rough division of labor, South Africa's 1,100,000 whites of British descent run the country's commerce and industry (including the richest gold and diamond mines on earth), and leave its politics to the dominion's 1,500,000 largely rural Afrikaners. A consequence of this uneasy arrangement is that the most immoderate government in the British Commonwealth is fast driving the country toward race trouble and out of the empire.

Last week electoral colleges, formed according to Nationalist Premier Johannes Strydom's tricky new rules (TIME, May 23 et seq.), met to pack the country's Upper House and create the two-thirds majority that he needs to expunge from the constitution the hateful clause that for 45 years has guaranteed voting rights to 50,000 mixed-blood citizens. In Pretoria a handful of black-sashed members of the Women's Defense of the Constitution League took up their stations of mute protest outside the old brownstone Raad-saal where Premier Strydom staged his show. Inside, opposition United Party Leader J.G.N. Strauss denounced the proceedings as "immoral and unconstitutional," then walked out with all his followers. Thereupon the Nationalists, inflated their countrywide majority to 77 of the Senate's 89 members.

"So ends our Senate," said the antigovernment newspaper the Rand Daily Mail. The way is clear for Strydom to abolish the franchise of the last of South Africa's 8,500,000 nonwhites, and to enact apartheid and the total "master rule" of whites that he has preached so long. The way is also clear, at some future time, to proclaim a republic and make Afrikaans the only official language of the land. If the prospect disconcerted other English-speaking South Africans than a few Black Sashers, they were too despairing, or too interested in not rocking the boat, to show it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.