Olive Schreiner was one of those very rare personalities whose special gifts of insight into, and perception of, the eternal verities that in the last resort course of human affairs, charge them with a message to all mankind both of the generation into which they are born and those that are to follow after. For women, the great abstractions, such as love, beauty freedom, have a reality and a significance in their application to concrete social situations and individual predicaments that equip them to afford unique guidance to, and exercise special influence upon, their fellows. Not that the guidance is necessarily followed, or that the influence necessarily prevails-at all events in the generation that first experiences their impact. But that is not to say that the seeds broadcast by such sowers as these fail to bring forth their harvest in due season, and in some degree, whether tenfold or an hundredfold.

The writings of Olive Schreiner have gained international celebrity, on account, I believe, not only of their matchless language, but of the content of the message which they convey. That message, though addressed specifically to the peoples of South Africa, is based on values of universal validity. To her, the plural society of South Africa was a microcosm of a wider world and it is evident that this truth accounts for the world­wide interest in, and concern for, South African inter-racial affairs, which we are witnessing today.

On the eve of the birth of the Union of South Africa, Olive Schreiner published her Closer Union, originally the form of a series of letters in the Transvaal Leader in the form of a series of letters in the Transvaal Leader.

In it she sought to warn the peoples of South Africa, more particularly, the delegates to the National Convention, of the dangers of an attempt to fuse the four South African colonies into a unified, centralized State, and she pleaded for 'closer union' within the framework of a federal constitution.

It will be for each reader to judge, in the light of the history of the past half-century, whether this warning and plea were justified. The members of the Constitutional Reform Association profoundly believe that they were.

The fiftieth anniversary of union, therefore, was conceived by the Association to be a singularly appropriate moment to republish this work of Olive Schreiner's that has long been out of print.

Her preference for federation, rather than unification was based on her attachment to the concept of individual liberty. In comparatively small states, linked together by a federal bond, with power divided between a the government and the domestic governments of the various states, she perceived brighter prospects for the survival and development of human freedom than in an immense single state, with its centralized concentration of sovereign power.

Such was her general concept. Her arguments signs of the influence of the classical 19th century exponents of liberty, such as J. S. Mill, Lord Ac James Bryce, and so forth.

But reading between the lines, there is discernible an anxiety at the possible results of unification based on a particular nature of south African society. She stresses the fatal ultimate effects of a repressive and intolerant racial policy. With a rare prescience, she predicts the inevitability, under twentieth century conditions of inter-racial integration both on a world scale and in south Africa in particular, which would render such policy of racial discrimination of the northern states would under a unified government prevail over the comparatively liberal policy of the cape colony, that a special impetus to her advocacy of federation. Under federation the borders of the Cape Colony might serve as a barricades behind which individual liberty and free institutions might develop as an example to, and a potential influence upon the rest of South Africa. Unification, on the other hand, might provide the framework for centralised domination by the Whites caste, submerging the Cape and its institutions.

The Constitutional Reform Association believes that the constitutional foundations of Union will sooner or later have to re-laid in the interests of inter-racial harmony and co-operation. It under the inspiration of this belief that it offers to the public this republication of a brief but great work by one of South Africa's greatest daughters -

by Donald Molten