luence with ex-President Krueger and Mr. Fischer[292] to terminate
the war, in exchange for the promise of "autonomy" for the Boers and
a general armistice for the Cape rebels. However this may be, the
delegates of the Worcester Congress made it their chief business to
represent to the members of the Liberal party who favoured their
cause, that the recall of Lord Milner would remove the chief obstacle
to peace. This attempt never came within a measurable distance of
success; but its failure was not due to any want of effort on the part
of that section of the Liberal opposition which had been opposed to
the annexation of the Republics, and now denounced the British
Government and the Imperial troops for their "methods of barbarism."
The completeness with which Lord Courtney, Mr. Bryce, Mr.
Lloyd-George, Lord Loreburn (Sir Robert Reid), Mr. Burns, and other
prominent members of the Liberal party identified themselves with the
policy and action of the Afrikander Bond, is disclosed by the
proceedings which marked the banquet given on June 5th in honour of
Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer. Mr. Bryce, in a letter expressing his
approbation of the object of the banquet and his regret at his
inability to attend it, wrote: "Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer have not
only distinguished public records, but did excellent service, for
which the Government ought to have been grateful, in allaying passion
and averting disturbances in Cape Colony."[293] Lord (then Mr.)
Courtney, in proposing a vote of thanks to the guests of the evening,
declared that the annexation of the Republics was "a wrong and a
blunder"; adding that the Liberal policy would some day be "to temper
annexation, if not to abrogate it." Both Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer
revealed the aims of their mission with perfect frankness. The former,
after alluding to Mr. Chamberlain's luncheon as a display of the
"Imperial spirit of the servile senate who decreed ovations and
triumphs to Caligula and Domitian, when they had received rebuffs from
the ancestors both of ourselves and the heroic Dutch now struggling in
South Africa," and characterising Lord Milner's High Commissionership
as "a career of unmitigated and hopeless failure," proceeded to demand
his immediate recall. To employ Lord Milner in the settlement of the
new colonies, said Mr. Merriman, would be "a suicidal and ruinous
policy. He was a violent partizan; his predictions never came true;
the bursts of fustian and the frivolous