Royal Ambassador

The Guest. Wales, on his princely progress in Nigeria (TIME, Apr. 20), left Lagos on the seaboard and sped into the heart of the country.

For 44 hours, the royal train puffed and grunted its way through native hamlets, through bushland and sterile desert. At all peopled spots, natives, in riotous colors either knelt beside the railway and murmured bamka da suwa (a blessing on your coming) or, with shining, oily faces, voiced raucous enthusiasm.

For 23 miles, the Prince himself drove the train. Later, he received 20-c- in Nigerian money for his services, signed a mileage allowance form as a receipt.

At Kano, 705 miles from Lagos, the Prince was received by an assemblage of native chiefs in solemn pomp. Many gifts of the purest gold were made and after a stay of two days, during which he played tennis and polo, the Prince returned to the sea and the Repulse, which, amid the cheering hullabaloo from the shore, turned her bows toward the south and churned her way to Cape Town, the point de depart for an extended tour of the Union of South Africa.

Hosts. In South Africa, the scene was set for the reception of the Prince. At the head of the receiving line of a nation of 7,000,000 blacks, yellows, semi-whites, whites, stood three veterans of government--Athlone, Smuts, Hertzog.

Governor General the Earl of Athlone, royal uncle of the Prince, represents His Majesty the King, aloof from local wrangles, immaculate symbol of British sway. He presides at the capital city of Pretoria* and is expected at Cape Town for the Prince's arrival.

General Jan Christian Smuts, of Dutch descent, acquired fame in the Boer War, and a share of immortality as joint-father of the League of Nations. He, an "Imperialist," in the sense of keeping South Africa in the British Empire, is already at Cape Town where he is leader of the Opposition in the Dominion Legislature.

For the present, however, more in the foreground than either of these gentlemen is James Barry Munnik Hertzog who, in June of last year, succeeded General Smuts as Prime Minister of the Dominion. Hertzog fought without distinction as a Boer General against the British in the South African War (1899-1902), but in negotiating the Peace of Vereeniging, he rose to equal prominence with Generals Botha and Smuts, his brother officers. For a decade, he worked with these two.

Botha and Smuts dropped General Hertzog in 1912. He became once more a Republican, stood passively aside in 1914 when a rebellion against the Government's decision to participate in the Great War profoundly disturbed the country. After the War, in 1918, he came boldly to the front, advocated secession from the Commonwealth in his famous two-stream policy.*

But it is a far cry from 1918 to the present day and the South African lion has been tamed by the greatest of all tamers--Government responsibility. In June of last year, he succeeded Premier Smuts (TIME, June 30) and with the help of the Labor Party mustered a majority in the House of Assembly. To get Labor's help, he was obliged to renounce any immediate effort towards secession; becoming Premier, he has buried this bugaboo, in many speeches has pronounced its funeral oration. It is therefore certain that he extends a welcome to the Prince of Wales not only in his own name but in the name of the Union.

The Visit. The Prince's coming unquestionably has an object of the very highest importance to the country and to any Government, whatever its complexion, that is in power. This object is less a formal visit to the last unvisited Dominion, less a question of London policy, still less an attempt to reconcile Boer and Briton, than a national rally to combat the greatest peril of the white man in South Africa.

Conditions of the soil in the Union make the crop yield low. Possibly less grain is grown to the acre than in any country in the world. This makes cheap labor essential to the farmers and cheap labor is invariably black or yellow. The same can be said of the great Rand and other mining industries where white working men are employed almost exclusively as overseers.

The concomitant of these conditions is revealed in the census reports of 1904 and 1921:

WHITE COLORED

1904 1,116,806 4,059,018

1921 1,519,488 5,409,092

INCREASE 402,682 1,350,074

This prodigious increase in the native population is the real problem of the country. White men are driven to the cities and even out of the country by cheap colored labor, and the blacks, no longer engaged in inter-tribal warfare, are now increasing six times as fast as the whites.

That the whites contribute to this condition is evident from the story of a Boer farmer (the Boers consider themselves the aristocrats of the country) and his several sons who ruefully gazed at their crops being choked by weeds. No black labor was obtainable, but it never occurred to the farmer and his sons to do the weeding themselves.

In a nutshell, the problem: 1) A demand for colored labor is far in excess of the supply; 2) the colored, particularly the indigenous Negro, is growing more and more resentful of the high wages paid to the whites and to the protection of the skilled trades; 3) the class of poor whites who cannot find employment is growing larger.

Premier Hertzog went into office with his segregation policy--a term which was well understood. The policy is generally called General Hertzog's, but differs little from that of the late Premier Botha and ex-Premier Smuts. In essence, it divides the country into large tracts, some for the whites, some for the Negroes. Each in his own territorial sphere is to be allowed independently to work out his own salvation; but the matter of employing whites or Negroes in either of the several tracts is to be self-determined. When segregation becomes a fait accompli, the native (the Cape Town native already has the franchise) is to be enfranchised.

The visit of the Prince of Wales is therefore to signal, not so much the invisible, inaudible welding of Dutch and British ascendancy, as an attempt to strengthen the morale of the whites--to secure the whites against the "rising tide of color." Premier Hertzog, faced by this difficulty, doubtless feels a genuine welcome towards the symbol of empire, as he prepares to meet his Prince.

*There is no single capital of South Africa, owing to the fact that, at the time of the Union, British and Dutch jealousy made it imperative to establish two capitals, one at Pretoria, one at Cape Town. In this respect, South Africa is unique.

*In a speech at Grahamstown, General Hertzog once said: "The national life in South Africa flows forth in two streams, each stream having its own language, manners, great men, heroic deeds and noble characters; that this is so is due to history and nobody is to be blamed and each has his right to the appreciation of the other. When we have developed such a national spirit that we consider these matters as common to both sections, both English and Dutch will say: 'Your language, heroic deeds and great men are ours because we are both "Afrikanders.' "