y implore you
not to depart from the High Commissioner's five years'
compromise, which the Uitlanders accepted with great
reluctance. The absolute necessity for a satisfactory
settlement with an Imperial guarantee is emphasised by the
insincerity and bad faith persistently shown during the
Volksraad discussion of the Franchise Law."--C. 9,415.]

[Sidenote: The relapse in England.]

It is scarcely possible to believe that Mr. Chamberlain, with Lord
Milner's telegrams before him, was himself prepared to accept
President Krueger's illusory franchise scheme. The source of the
weakness of the Government in the conduct of the negotiations, no less
than in its refusal to make adequate preparations for war, is to be
found in the inability of the mass of the people of England to
understand how completely British power in South Africa had been
undermined by the Afrikander nationalists during the last twenty
years. How could the average elector know that the refusal or
acceptance of the Volksraad Bill, differing only from the Bloemfontein
minimum in an insignificant--as it seemed--particular of two years,
would, in fact, make known to all European South Africa whether
President Krueger or the British Government was master of the
sub-continent? In view of this profound ignorance of South African
conditions, and the consequent uncertainty of any assured support,
even from the members of their own party, the Salisbury Cabinet may
well have argued: "Here is something at last that we can represent as
a genuine concession. Let us take it, and have done with this
troublesome South African question; or leave it to the next Liberal
Government to settle."

If the Cabinet did so reason to themselves, what English statesman
could have "cast the first stone" at them? But how profound is the
interval between the spirit of the policy of "the man on the spot,"
with his eyes upon the object, and the spirit of the policy of the
island statesman with one eye upon the hustings and the other strained
to catch an intermittent glimpse of an unfamiliar and distant Africa!

[Sidenote: Lord Milner's anxiety.]

This 19th of July was a dark day for the High Commissioner. In the
morning came Mr. Chamberlain's telegram with its ominous suggestion of
a change for the worse in the attitude of the Home Government. And
this change in the Cabinet was, as Lord Milner knew, only the natural
reflection of a