D1.8.22: [Untitled]

D1.8.22: [Untitled]

Newspaper Clippings

Bleek prefers a federal system of government, which decentralises power and accommodates the pluralism of a heterogeneous population spread across a vast territorial expanse. He submits how federalisation and constitutionalism achieve a limitation and separation of powers. He believes the experiences of America, where centralisation destabilised, the German Confederation, and the earlier Swiss Confederation of Cantons (before the 1848 revolutions) support his stance. Bleek extols the merits of the (re-)unification, looking at the project for a united Germany under hegemonic Prussia, of individually ineffectual units into one consolidated whole accommodating idiosyncrasies. Such adverse times beget pragmatic men like Lincoln, 'fitted for the iron rule', with the ideal hardness of character. He abruptly turns to complaints against the Stercus Company's disruptive operations near Fort Knokke, Salt River. Northerly winds carry the effluvia over to Observatory and as far as Mowbray. Perhaps to convey the intensity of local winds, he remarks that Easterners cite it as one of Table Valley's acute discomforts.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

23 February 1865

One cut-out column of printed newsprint mounted on foolscap folio (warped).

Cape Flats (its most uninhabited parts), Table Mountain Valley (easterly winds add to its discomforts), winds (Easterners object to easterly), Stercus Company (effluvia from Salt River operation)

Pressed clippings of Victorian current affairs opinion pieces by Wilhelm Bleek. Published in Het Volksblad on Thursday, February 23rd, 1865.

Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co.