ut he applies this conception in methods adapted to the narrow
and illiberal conditions of his isolated and self-centred life.

[Footnote 86: Expressing approval of the position Lord Milner
had taken up at Bloemfontein. See p. 173.]

As for the mediation of the Cape Afrikanders, Lord Milner estimated it
at its real value. The Cape nationalists believed that war would
result in disaster to their cause; the Republican nationalists did
not. They both hated the British in an equal degree. But the
Afrikander leaders at the Cape knew that they had the game in their
own hands. "For goodness' sake," they said, "keep quiet until we have
got rid of this creature, Milner; and the Salisbury Cabinet--the
'present team so unjustly disposed to us'--is replaced by a Liberal
Government."

[Sidenote: Lord Milner's task.]

That was the meaning of their mediation--nothing more. Lord Milner
acquiesced in the negotiations after Bloemfontein, but what he wanted
was a polite but absolutely inflexible insistence upon the
Bloemfontein minimum, and at the same time such military preparations
as, in view of the clear possibility of a failure of negotiations,
seemed to him absolutely vital. This, however, was not the course
which the Salisbury Cabinet thought right to adopt; and the problem
that now lay before him was to convert the illusory concessions, which
were all that Afrikander mediation was able or even desirous to wring
from President Krueger, into the genuine reform that the British
Government had twice pledged itself to secure.

But Lord Milner had also grasped the fact that the one issue which
could drive a wedge into Dutch solidarity was the franchise question.
He had determined, therefore, that nothing that transpired at the
Bloemfontein Conference should permit President Krueger to change the
ground of dispute from this central issue. During the negotiations
between the Home Government and the Pretoria Executive that followed
the Conference, and especially during the period of Mr. Hofmeyr's
active intervention, his most necessary and pressing task was to
prevent the Salisbury Cabinet from being "jockeyed" by Boer diplomacy
out of the advantageous position which he had then taken up on its
behalf. The pressure of the Hofmeyr mediation increased the difficulty
of this task by driving President Krueger into a series of franchise
proposals of the utmost complexity. The danger was that Mr.
Chamberlain and his colle