marmalade with machine guns. Such is their simple creed. And in this
matter they want nothing of what Mr. Merriman recently called the
"damnable interference" of the mother country. But to handle the native
question there had to be created a single South-African Government
competent to deal with it.

The constitution creates for South Africa a union entirely different
from that of the provinces of Canada or the States of the American
Republic. The government is not federal, but unitary. The provinces
become areas of local governments, with local elected councils to
administer them, but the South-African Parliament reigns supreme. It is
to know nothing of the nice division of jurisdiction set up by the
American constitution and by the British North America Act. There are,
of course, limits to its power. In the strict sense of legal theory,
the omnipotence of the British Parliament, as in the case of Canada,
remains unimpaired. Nor can it alter certain things,--for example, the
native franchise of the Cape, and the equal status of the two
languages,--without a special majority vote. But in all the ordinary
conduct of trade, industry, and economic life, its power is unhampered
by constitutional limitations.

The constitution sets up as the government of South Africa a
legislature of two houses--a Senate and a House of Assembly--and with
it an executive of ministers on the customary tenure of cabinet
government. This government, strangely enough, is to inhabit two
capitals: Pretoria as the seat of the Executive Government and Cape
Town as the meeting-place of the Parliament. The experiment is a novel
one. The case of Simla and Calcutta, in each of which the Indian
Government does its business, and on the strength of which Lord Curzon
has defended the South-African plan, offers no real parallel. The truth