his intelligence and the strength
of his mind, Cecil Rhodes will always be found inferior to the present
Viscount Milner as a statesman. Rhodes could not and would not wait.
Milner spent his whole existence in waiting, and waited so successfully
that he lived to see the realisation of the plans which he had made and
which so many, even among his friends, had declared to be quite impossible
for him to realise. Milner, about whose tact and mental greatness so many
false notions existed in South Africa as well as elsewhere, had been the
one man who had seen clearly the consequences of the war. As he told me
one day when we were talking about the regrettable race-hatred which lent
such animosity to the struggle: "It will cease sooner than one thinks."

The wise administrator, who had studied human nature so closely as he had
done politics, had based his judgments on the knowledge which he had
acquired of the spirit of colonisation which makes Great Britain so
superior to any other nation in the world, and his belief that her
marvellous spirit of adaptation was bound to make itself felt in South
Africa as it had elsewhere. Sir Alfred Milner knew that as time went on
the Afrikanders would realise that their erstwhile enemies had given them
the position to which they had always aspired, a position which entitled
them to take a place among the other great nations of the world. He knew,
too, that their natural spirit of pride and of vanity would make them
cherish the Empire that had allowed them to realise their ambitions of the
past. Until the war they had been proud of their gold and of their
diamonds; after the war they would be proud of their country. And by the
consciousness which would gradually come to them of the advantages which
their Federation under the British flag had brought to them they would
become also ardent British patriots--blessing the day when, in a passing
fit of insanity, goaded into it by people who had never seen clearly the
situation, President Kruger had declared war on England.

INDEX

Africa, South, charm of, 22
conquest of, 1
drunkenness in, 223
English colonists, 14
prior to Boer War, 6
Union of (_see_ Union)

Afrikander Bond, 86, 99
and Rhodes, 73, 82, 84
and Sir A. Milner, 134

Afrikander party compel Rhodes' resignation, 50
Aliwal North concentration camp, 182
America's response to concentration camp appeal, 165

B

Bark