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No love is lost between bumbling Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of Great Britain and bawling Premier General James Barry Munnik Hertzog of South Africa. Last week Mr. Hertzog did his blatant best (at his exceedingly safe distance from Benito Mussolini) to make Mr. Baldwin seem cowardly in not pressing Sanctions against Italy. By a tremendous majority the South African Senate voted its undying support of the League of Nations, its defiance of the Conqueror of Ethiopia. And in London was Oswald Pirow. He was received in audience by Edward VIII. His Majesty's discerning former private secretary, Sir Godfrey Thomas, dined with Oswald Pirow, both being guests of the South African diamond tycoon, Sir Abe Bailey. Mr. Pirow called on the Secretary for Dominions, dry and cheerful little Son Malcolm MacDonald. Mr. Pirow made the official rounds of London and to intimates he confided that he thought his welcome, if anything, too hospitable. The British Islanders, he was resolved, should not take in the Union of South Africa. She had something more precious than diamonds to sell the Mother Country, and Oswald Pirow had come all the way from Pretoria to London to sell it at the highest possible price. In the end the price Mother Britain might be willing to pay South Africa must be named by the British Admiralty—by Sir Samuel Hoare.
The bold purpose of Oswald Pirow and his chief, Premier Hertzog, was understood in London to rest on their assumption that the Mother Country must establish an imperial and oceanic naval base of the first magnitude on the new Lifeline of Empire, presumably at or near Capetown, and that for the right to do so she could be made to pay a stiff price by South Africa.
Oswald Pirow was authoritatively said to want: 1) surrender by Britain to South Africa of the so-called "native protectorates" in the dominion to make its sovereignty complete; 2) Britain to pay the enormous cost of establishing near Capetown a naval base ranking with $150,000,000 Singapore, but South Africa to retain full sovereignty over the territory of the base; 3) Great Britain to recognize explicitly that South Africa is not bound to participate in a war entered by the Mother Country; 4) mutual agreement between Mother and Daughter that if, as South Africa anticipates, the Government of Portugal encounters heavy weather and its African colonies "fall upon the market," South Africa will share with Great Britain in determining their fate.*