of the
next two months. General Butler was not recalled until the latter part
of August; his successor, General Forestier-Walker, did not arrive
until September 6th. We have traced the causes which made it
impossible for the Imperial Government, as they conceived, to do more
than this; and when in due course we come to consider the broad phases
of the war, the nature of the penalty which the British Army, and the
British nation, had to pay for the partial paralysis of the Government
will become sufficiently apparent.

The man who suffered most by all this was Lord Milner. When he asked
for military preparations, he was told that he could not have them.
When he asked for the removal of a military adviser with whom he was
supremely dissatisfied, he was told that he must put up with General
Butler for a little longer. He put up with him for two months. His
Colonial ministers, whose advice on many points he was bound to accept
so long as he did not dismiss them, were men placed in office by the
Dutch subjects of the Crown for the very purpose of frustrating, by
constitutional means, the successful intervention in the Transvaal, by
which alone, in his opinion, British supremacy could be made a
reality.

Indeed, the odds were heavily against Lord Milner in his task of
saving England, in spite of herself and in spite of the enemies of
whose power she was wholly ignorant, and to whose very existence she
remained contemptuously indifferent. To the great mass of the British
population in South Africa, he stood for England and English justice.
To them he seemed the representative man, for whom they had waited
many a long year. They felt that he was fighting their battle and
doing their work; and, making allowance for local jealousies and
accidental partialities, they never ceased to regard him thus. This
was his one and only source of assured support. But he was far removed
from the active British centres: from the group of towns formed by
the Albany settlers and their descendants in the Eastern Province, and
from Kimberley, Durban and Maritzburg, and Johannesburg. In the Cape
peninsula, of course, there was a considerable British population of
professional and commercial men; but this population had been so
closely related by business and social ties with the preponderant
Dutch population of the Western Province that many among them
hesitated to declare themselves openly against the Dutch party. All
who were members of the Pro