him friends among the very people to
whom his policy had not been acceptable. The abuse showered by certain
newspapers upon the High Commissioner not only strengthened his hands and
his authority, but transformed what ought to have remained a personal
question into one in which the dignity as well as the prestige of the
Empire was involved. To have recalled him after he had been subjected to
such treatment would have been equivalent to a confession that the State
was in the wrong. I have never been able to understand how men of such
undoubted perception as Mr. Sauer or Mr. Merriman, or other leaders of the
Bond, did not grasp this fact. Sir Alfred himself put the aspect very
cleverly before the public in an able and dignified speech which he made
at the lunch offered to Lord Roberts by the Mayor and Corporation of Cape
Town when he said, "To vilify her representative is a strange way to show
one's loyalty to the Queen."

A feature in Sir Alfred Milner's character, which was little known outside
the extremely small circle of his personal friends, was that when he was
in the wrong he never hesitated to acknowledge the fact with
straightforward frankness. His judgments were sometimes hasty, but he was
always willing to amend an opinion on just grounds. There was a good deal
of dogged firmness in his character, but not a shred of stubbornness or
obstinacy. He never yielded one inch of his ground when he believed
himself to be in the right, but he was always amenable to reason, and he
never refused to allow himself to be convinced, even though it may be that
his natural sympathies were not on the side of those with whom he had got
to deal. Very few statesmen could boast of such qualities, and they surely
ought to weigh considerably in the balance of any judgment passed upon
Viscount Milner.

The welfare of South Africa and the reputation of Sir Alfred would have
been substantially enhanced had he been able to assert his own authority
according to his own judgment, without overrulings from Whitehall, and
with absolute freedom as to choice of colleagues. His position was most
difficult, and though he showed no outward sign of this fact, it is
impossible to believe that he did not feel its crushing weight. Between
the Bond, Mr. Hofmeyr, the race hatred which the Dutch accused him of
fomenting, the question of the refugees, the clamours of the Jingo
Colonials, and the extreme seriousness of the military situation at one
time,