ABSTRACT
Fifty-one years precisely elapsed between the inauguration of the Union of South Africa in its chosen capital of Pretoria on May 31, 1910, and its ending on May 31, 1961, when once more in a crowded capital a state new in constitutional form, the Republic of South Africa, was proclaimed. The problems of South Africa are problems that vex the mind and conscience of the mid-twentieth-century world. They are for that reason matters for debate in the market-place and at the United Nations. The failure of successive South African Governments between 1948 and 1961 was to make the least concession to the changing temper of the times has brought upon South Africa denunciations from the pulpit and from the press, boycotts, expulsion from the Commonwealth, virtual isolation in the Western world, unrelenting criticism from newly independent Afro-Asian states, and the hostility of the Eastern Communist powers.
