ellion, justice seemed to
demand that they should suffer the full political penalty.
Disfranchisement for life did not seem to Her Majesty's
Government to be a very serious punishment for rebellion."

[Sidenote: Mr. Schreiner resigns.]

On June 11th Lord Milner was informed by Mr. Schreiner that ministers
were hopelessly divided on the subject of the treatment of the rebels,
and that their differences could not be composed, and on the following
day he replied that, if he could not receive the support of a
unanimous Cabinet to which he, as Governor, was constitutionally
entitled, he would be compelled, in the discharge of his duty, to seek
it elsewhere. Mr. Schreiner's resignation, which was placed in Lord
Milner's hands on the next day, was followed by the appointment, on
June 18th, of a Progressive Ministry with Sir Gordon Sprigg as Prime
Minister and Sir James Rose Innes as Attorney-General. Mr. Schreiner,
in his memorandum of June 11th, had forwarded to Lord Milner documents
containing particulars of the individual views of the members of his
Cabinet. Mr. Solomon, the Attorney-General, was prepared to adopt a
policy in respect of the treatment of the rebels, and the machinery by
which that policy was to be carried out, which appeared to him to
involve nothing that would prevent "complete accord between Her
Majesty's Government and this Government on the question." And in this
view both Mr. Schreiner and Mr. Herholdt concurred. But the remaining
members of the Cabinet were entirely opposed to any policy other than
that of granting a general amnesty to all rebels except the "principal
offenders," and allowing these latter to be tried by the machinery of
justice already in existence--_i.e._ by Afrikander juries. The minutes
which they respectively addressed to the Prime Minister were bitter
invectives directed alike against the Home Government and Lord Milner.

"We are asked," Mr. Merriman wrote, on his own and Mr. Sauer's
behalf, with reference to the suggestions of the Home Government,
"to deal with a number of men who have, at worst, taken up arms
in what they, however erroneously, considered to be a righteous
war--a war in which they joined the Queen's enemies to resist
what prominent men both here and in England have repeatedly
spoken of as a crime.... These men, irrespective of class, we are
asked to put under a common political proscription, to deprive