rebellion, still more perhaps General Carleton, who
administered French Canada in the critical period after its conquest and
during the American War. Lord Milner, in political theory, not in
personality, corresponds to Fitzgibbon. His view was that British
prestige and authority could only be maintained in the future by thus
humbling the national pride of our adversaries, who, moreover, by the
formal annexations of 1900, carried into effect when the war was still
young, were by a legal fiction rebels, not belligerents. Lord Kitchener,
besides seeing, as the responsible soldier in the field, the sheer
physical impossibility of lowering the Boer national pride by any
military operations he had the power to undertake, from the beginning of
the guerilla war onwards, was a truer judge of human nature and a better
Imperialist at heart in realizing that the self-respect of the Boers was
a precious asset, not a dangerous menace to the Empire, and that the
whole fate of South Africa depended on a racial reconciliation on the
basis of equal political rights, which would be for ever precluded by
compelling the Boers to pass under the Caudine Forks.

Fortunately Lord Kitchener was supported by the Home Government, and the
Peace of Vereeniging took the form of a surrender on terms, or,
virtually, of a treaty, formally guaranteeing, among other things, the
concession "when circumstances should permit" of "representative
institutions leading up to self-government." The next ordeal of British
statesmanship came when the time arrived in 1905 to redeem this promise.
There were two distinctly defined alternatives: one, to profit by
experience and to give responsible government at once; the other, for
the time being, to copy one of the constitutional models which had long
been obsolete curiosities in the history of all the white Colonies,
which had never failed to produce mischievous results, whether in a
bi-racial or a uni-racial community, and which were in reality suited
only to groups of officials and traders living in the midst of
uneducated coloured races in tropical lands. The Government, and we
cannot doubt that their traditional policy toward Ireland warped their
views, declared for the latter alternative, and issued under Letters
Patent a Constitution which happily never came into force. Like the Act
of Union with Ireland, it gave the shadow of freedom without the
substance. It set up a single Legislative Chamber, four-fifths ele