lumsily into his carriage, and although he
retained all his old tenacity of purpose, his mind had lost much of
its former alertness. It needed all Mr. Smuts' mental resources--all
that the young Afrikander had so recently learnt at Cambridge and the
Temple--to enable the old President to maintain, even by the aid of
his State-Attorney's ingenious paper pleadings, a decent show of
defence against the perfect moderation and relentless logic with which
the High Commissioner presented the British case. Lord Milner went to
the Conference to make "one big straightforward effort to avert a
great disaster"; Krueger to drive a "Kafir bargain." The end was as
Lord Milner had foreseen. To yield the necessary instalment of reform
seemed to President Krueger, in this mind, "worse than annexation"; and
on June 5th Lord Milner declared, "The Conference is absolutely at an
end, and there is no obligation on either side arising out of it."

The Bloemfontein Conference made retreat for ever impossible. Lord
Milner himself was perfectly conscious that in holding President
Krueger to the franchise question he had made the conference the
pivotal occasion upon which turned the issue of peace or war. He knew,
when he closed the proceedings with a declaration that his meeting
with President Krueger had utterly failed to provide a solution of the
franchise question, that from this day forward there could be no
turning back for him or for the Imperial Government. But he knew, too,
that poor as was the prospect of obtaining the minimum reforms by any
subsequent negotiation, nothing could contribute more to the
attainment of this object than the blunt rejection of the makeshift
proposals put forward by President Krueger at Bloemfontein.

[Sidenote: After the conference.]

The result of the Conference, from this point of view, and its effect
upon the British population in South Africa, may be gathered from the
address presented to Lord Milner on his return to Capetown, and from
his reply to it. By the mouth of Mr. Alfred Ebden, a veteran colonist,
the British population of the Colony then (June 12th) expressed their
"admiration" of Lord Milner's "firm stand" on behalf of the
Uitlanders, offered him their "earnest support," and declared their
"entire confidence in his fairness and ability to bring these unhappy
differences to a satisfactory settlement." The essence of Lord
Milner's reply lies in the words, "some remedy has still to be found."
The