Trial Balloon

Unpretentious, friendly, brilliant Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr is Finance Minister of South Africa, heir apparent to 73-year-old Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts. Hofmeyr is also part owner of the Forum, South Africa's only liberal weekly. Last week the Forum's editor and Hofmeyr's protege, John Patrick Cope, pricked open two of the Union's deepest sores, proposed a radical cure.

Cope postulated South Africa's problem No. 1 today as the racial deadlock, said it distorts all major issues brought before Parliament and prevents united progressive action on native (Negro) policy, industrialization, agriculture and a dozen other major problems. Wrote he: "Nationalists want an Afrikaans Herrenvolk Republic, British extremists want a jingo Dominion. If no positive move is made to break this deadlock, the Smuts Government will collapse within five years. Chaos will follow which may end in a fight to the death between Englishmen and Afrikanders. . . ."

Cope's proposed solution: Englishmen should agree to form a republic, Afrikanders should accept it and agree to stay within the British Commonwealth. Anti-British Afrikanders, who outnumber and might outvote the English, were delighted. The English press was hostile. ("Sheer folly," grunted the Johannesburg Rand Daily Mail).

Minister Hofmeyr's Editor Cope thus got at two festering divisions in South African life: 1) between the Union's 2,000,000 whites and its 8,000,000 submerged, nonvoting blacks; 2) between the white, minority "English" (mostly second, third or fourth generation) and the white Afrikanders (Dutch and Huguenot descent). Just what a republic would do for the whites, who already have a free vote in the Union's parliamentary system, was not clear; it presumably would do nothing for the blacks.

But the suggestion sprang from a deep South African need. Union leaders like Liberal Afrikanders Smuts and Hofmeyr hope to find for their country a stronger world position in the peace to come. Their hope will be nearer realization when & if they find the key to unity at home.