harge of entering upon the discussion in an aggressive spirit,
calculated to make agreement difficult. If he adopted a conciliatory
tone, his arguments seemed to be nothing more than the abortive
protests with which the grim old President had cheerfully filled the
republican waste-paper basket for the last ten years. It has been
suggested that Lord Milner might have obtained a better result if he
had shown himself less "inflexible"; if, in short, he had been willing
to accept a "compromise." But any such criticism is based upon an
entire misunderstanding of the method which the High Commissioner did,
in fact, adopt. The five years' franchise--the Bloemfontein
minimum--was in itself a compromise. What Lord Milner said, in effect,
to President Krueger was this: "I have a whole sheaf of grievances
against you: the dynamite monopoly, excessive railway rates,
interference with the independence of the judiciary, a vicious police
system, administrative corruption, municipal abuses, and the rest. I
will let all these go in exchange for one thing--a franchise reform
which will give at once to a fair proportion of the Uitlander
population some appreciable representation in the government of the
Republic." Lord Milner not only offered a compromise, but a compromise
that enormously reduced the area of dispute. His "inflexibility" arose
from the simple fact that, having readily and frankly yielded all that
could be yielded without sacrificing the paramount object of securing
a permanent settlement of the Uitlander question, he had nothing
further to concede, and said so.

[Sidenote: President Krueger.]

No two men more characteristic of the two utterly unlike and
antagonistic political systems, which they respectively represented,
could have been found. At the evening reception given by President
Steyn on the opening day of the Conference, a big man, in a tightly
buttoned frock-coat, stood just inside the door for ten minutes, and
then moved awkwardly away. Above the frock-coat was a peasant's face,
half-shrewd, half-furtive, with narrow eyes and a large, crooked mouth
which somehow gave the man a look of power. This was President Krueger,
_aetat._ 74. Once, doubtless, Paul Krueger's large and powerful frame
had made him an impressive figure among a race of men as stalwart as
the Boers. But he was now an old man: the powerful body had become
shapeless and unwieldy; he had given up walking, and only left his
stoep to drag himself c