In the year following (1886) the Bond met officially, for the first and only time, as an inter-state organisation. Bloemfontein was the place of a.s.semblage, and in the Central Bestuur, or Committee, the South African Republic, the Free State, and the Cape Colony were each represented by two delegates. This meeting revealed the practical difficulties which prevented the Cape nationalists from adopting the definitely anti-British programme of the Bond leaders in the Republics; and the conflict of commercial interests between the Cape Colony and the Transvaal, already initiated by the attempt of the latter to secure Bechua.n.a.land in 1884-5, confirmed the Cape delegates in their decision to develop the Bond in the Cape Colony upon colonial rather than inter-state lines. The result of the divergences of aim manifested at Bloemfontein was speedily made apparent in the Cape Colony. In 1887 Mr. T. P. Theron, then Secretary of the Bond, delivered an address in which the new, or Hofmeyr, programme was formulated and officially adopted. In recommending the new policy to the members of the Bond, Mr. Theron made no secret of the nature of the considerations by which its leaders had been chiefly influenced.
"You must remember," he said, "that the eyes of all are directed towards you. The Press will cause your actions, expressions, and resolutions to be known everywhere. You cannot but feel how much depends on us for our nation and our country. If we must plead guilty in the past of many an unguarded expression, let us be more cautious and guarded for the future."
And he then proceeded to sketch a picture of racial conciliation, when all "differences and disagreements" between Dutch and English would be merged in the consciousness of a new and common nationality--pointing out, however, that the advent of that day depended on "you and me, my fellow Bond members."
[Sidenote: Rhodes and Hofmeyr.]
a.s.suming that the predominance of Afrikander ideals could be secured only by the complete separation of the local governments from the Government of Great Britain, nothing could be more masterly than the manner in which the Bond approached the task of reuniting the European communities of South Africa--the task which the Imperial Government had abandoned as hopeless. As inspired and controlled by Hofmeyr during the years between this date (1887) and the Jameson Raid, the Bond embodied a volume of effort in which the most sincere supporter of the British connection could co-operate. It was the a.s.sistance afforded by the Bond in moulding British administration in South Africa upon South African lines that provided the common ground upon which Rhodes and Hofmeyr met in their long alliance. Hofmeyr probably never abandoned his belief that a republican form of government was the inevitable _denouement_ to which the administration of South Africa on a basis of South African ideas must lead. Rhodes never wavered in his loyalty to the British connection. But there was a great body of useful work which both men could accomplish in common, which each desired to see accomplished, which, when accomplished, would leave each free to choose the path--Republican or Imperial--by which the last stage was to be traversed and the goal of South African unity finally attained.
The character and career of Rhodes afford material for a study of such peculiar and engrossing interest that any adequate treatment of the subject would require a separate volume. Fortunately, the broad facts of his life are sufficiently well known to make it unnecessary to attempt the almost impossible task of condensing a volume within the limits of a few pages. None the less, there is one incident in his political career which must be recalled here, and that for the simple reason that it establishes two facts, each of which is essential to the complete understanding of the situation in the Cape Colony as it developed immediately after the Raid. First, that all through the years of the Rhodes-Hofmeyr alliance the Bond remained at heart true to the aim which it had at first openly avowed--the aim of establishing a united South Africa under its own flag. And second, that Rhodes was equally staunch in maintaining his ideal of a united South Africa under the British flag. The incident which exhibits both these facts in the clearest light is the refusal by Rhodes of the overtures made to him by Borckenhagen. At the time when these overtures were made Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, the Chartered Company had been successfully launched, and the alliance between himself and Hofmeyr was in full operation. The occasion which led to them was the opening of the railway at Bloemfontein in 1890--a railway constructed by the Cape Government under a friendly arrangement with the Free State. And it was one, therefore, which afforded a conspicuous example of the value of the Bond influence as a means of securing progress in the direction of South African unity.
The story was told by Rhodes himself in a speech which he made in the Cape Colony on March 12th, 1898.
[Sidenote: Rhodes and Borckenhagen.]
"I remember," he said, "that we had a great meeting at Bloemfontein, and in the usual course I had to make a speech. I think I was your Prime Minister. And this speech pleased many there, and especially--and I speak of him with the greatest respect--a gentleman who is dead, Mr. Borckenhagen. He came to me and asked me to dictate to him the whole of my speech. I said, "I never wrote a speech, and I don"t know what I said; but I will tell you what I know about it." He wrote it down, and afterwards came to Capetown with me.... He spoke very nicely to me about my speech. "Mr. Rhodes, we want a united South Africa." And I said, "So do I; I am with you entirely. We must have a united South Africa." He said, "There is nothing in the way." And I said, "No; there is nothing in the way. Well," I said, "we are one." "Yes,"
he said, "and I will tell you: we will take you as our leader,"
he said. "There is only one small thing, and that is, we must, of course, be independent to the rest of the world." I said, "No; you take me either for a rogue or a fool. I would be a rogue to forget all my history and traditions; and I would be a fool, because I would be hated by my own countrymen and mistrusted by yours." From that day he a.s.sumed a most acrid tone in his _Express_ towards myself, and I was made full sorry at times by the tone. But that was the overpowering thought in his mind--an independent South Africa."[23]
[Footnote 23: _Cecil Rhodes: His Political Life and Speeches._ By Vindex; p. 533. Borckenhagen had just died.]
The facts here disclosed explain how it was that the apparently satisfactory situation in South Africa before the Raid so rapidly developed into the dangerous situation of the years that followed it.
The Raid tore aside the veil which the Rhodes-Hofmeyr alliance had cast over the eyes alike of Dutch and British, and left them free to see the essential antagonism of aim between the two men in its naked truth.[24] From that moment Rhodes was recognised by the Bond as its chief and most dangerous enemy; and as such he was pursued by its bitterest hostility to the day of his death; while Rhodes, on the other hand, was driven to seek support solely in the people of his own nationality. From that moment the Bond fell back upon the policy of 1881. The Dutch Press, pulpit, and platform commenced an active nationalist propaganda on the old racial lines; and the advocacy of anti-British aims increased in boldness and in definiteness as the Transvaal grew strong with its inflowing armaments.
[Footnote 24: _Ons Land_, reputed to be controlled by Hofmeyr himself, and certainly the recognised organ of the Bond, published a paean of triumph over the surrender of Dr.
Jameson"s troopers at Doornkop. "Afrikanderdom has awakened to a sense of earnestness which we have not observed since the heroic war of liberty in 1881. From the Limpopo, as far as Capetown, the second Majuba has given birth to a new inspiration and a new movement amongst our people in South Africa.... The flaccid and cowardly imperialism that had already begun to dilute and weaken our national blood, gradually turned aside before the new current that permeated our people.... Now or never the foundation of a wide-embracing nationalism must be laid.... The part.i.tion wall has disappeared ... never has the necessity for a policy of a colonial and republican union been greater; now the psychological moment has arrived; now our people have awakened all over South Africa; a new glow illumines our hearts; let us lay the foundation-stone of a real United South Africa on the soil of a pure and all-comprehensive national sentiment."]
[Sidenote: Effects of the raid.]
We are now in a position to sum up the main features of the situation in South Africa as Lord Milner found it. British administration, controlled from Downing Street, had quickly led to what Sir George Grey called the dismemberment of European South Africa. The Imperial Government, having found out its mistake, had endeavoured to regain the lost solidarity of the European communities and its authority over them, by bringing the Republics into a federal system under the British Crown. It had been thwarted in this endeavour by the military resistance of the Boers in the Transvaal, and the fear of a like resistance on the part of the Dutch population throughout South Africa. Its impotency had invited, and in part justified, the efforts made by local British initiative to solve the problem of South African unity on South African lines, but in a manner consistent with the maintenance of British supremacy. The early success of these efforts, prosecuted mainly through the agency of Rhodes, had been obliterated by the Jameson Raid. All attempts to secure the reunion of South Africa under the British flag having failed alike under Imperial and local British initiative, the way was open for the Afrikander nationalists once more to put forward the alternative plan of a united South Africa under its own flag, which they had formulated in the year immediately following the retrocession of the Transvaal.
In proportion as the friends and supporters of British supremacy were discredited and depressed by the catastrophe of the Raid, the advocates and promoters of Afrikander nationalism were emboldened and encouraged. It was not Sir Gordon Sprigg, the Prime Minister of the Cape who succeeded the discredited Rhodes (January 13th, 1896), but Mr. Hofmeyr, the veteran leader of the Afrikander Bond, that dictated the policy which Lord Rosmead must pursue to re-establish the integrity of the Imperial Government in the minds of its Dutch subjects. At the next presidential election in the Free State (March 4th, 1896), Mr. J. G. Fraser, the head of the moderate party which followed in the steps of President Brand, was hopelessly beaten by Mr.
Marthinus Steyn, an Afrikander nationalist of the scientific school of Borckenhagen, and a politician whose immediate programme included the "closer union" of that state with the South African Republic, the terms of which were finally settled at Bloemfontein on March 9th, 1897. In the Cape Colony the Bond organised its resources with a view of securing even more complete control of the Cape Legislature at the general election of 1898. And lastly, President Kruger, who had ceased to rely upon Holland for administrative talent, and opened the lucrative offices of the South African Republic to the ambitious and educated Afrikander youth of the Free State and Cape Colony, commenced methodically and secretly to supply arms and ammunition to the adherents of the nationalist cause in the British Colonies.
[Sidenote: Situation in 1896.]
But disastrous as was the Jameson Raid in its method of execution and immediate effects, it produced certain results that cannot be held to have been prejudicial to the British cause in South Africa, if once we recognise the fact that the English people as a whole were totally ignorant, at the time of its occurrence, of the extent to which the sub-continent had already slipped from their grasp. Something of the long advance towards the goal of nationalist ambition, achieved by the Bond, was revealed. The emphatic cry of "Hands off" to Germany, for which the Kaiser"s telegram of congratulation provided the occasion, was undoubtedly the means of arresting the progress of that power, at a point when further progress would have gained her a foot-hold in South Africa from which nothing short of actual hostilities could have dislodged her. And more important still was the fact that the Raid, with its train of dramatic incidents, had published, once and for all, the humiliating position of the British population in the Transvaal throughout the length and breadth of the Anglo-Saxon world, and compelled the Imperial Government to pledge itself to obtain the redress of the "admitted grievances" of the Uitlanders.
[Sidenote: Mr. Chamberlain"s policy.]
Against the rallying forces of Afrikander nationalism Mr. Chamberlain, for the moment, had nothing to oppose but the vague and as yet unknown power of an awakened Imperial sentiment. Lord Rosmead"s att.i.tude at Pretoria had convinced him of the uselessness of expecting that any satisfactory settlement of the franchise question could be brought about through the agency of the High Commissioner. He, therefore, invited President Kruger to visit England in the hope that his own personal advocacy of the cause of the Uitlanders, backed up by the weight of the Salisbury Government, might remove the "root causes" of Transvaal unrest. But President Kruger refused to confer with the Colonial Secretary upon any other than the wholly inadmissible basis of the conversion of the London Convention into a treaty of amity such as one independent power might conclude with another. Mr. Chamberlain, therefore, having put upon record that the purpose of the proposed conference was to give effect to the London Convention and not to destroy it, proceeded to formulate a South African policy that would enable him to make the most effective use of the authority of Great Britain as paramount Power. His purpose was to win Dutch opinion in the Free State and the Cape Colony to the side of the Imperial Government, and then to use this more progressive Dutch opinion as the fulcrum by which the lever of Imperial remonstrance was to be successfully applied to the Transvaal Government. In the speech[25] in which he sketched the main lines of this policy he declared emphatically that the paramount power of England was to be maintained at all costs, that foreign intervention would not be permitted under any pretence, and that the admitted grievances of the Uitlanders were to be redressed:
[Footnote 25: 1896.]
"We have," he continued, "a confident hope that we shall be able in the course of no lengthened time to restore the situation as it was before the invasion of the Transvaal, to have at our backs the sympathy and support of the majority of the Dutch population in South Africa, and if we have that, the opinion--the united opinion--which that will const.i.tute, will be an opinion which no power in Africa can resist."
With the record of the last ten years before us it seems strange that Mr. Chamberlain should ever have believed in the efficacy of such a policy: still more strange that he should have spoken of his "confident hope" of winning the Afrikander nationalists to support the paramount Power. But it must be remembered that the evidence of the real sentiments and purposes of the nationalists here set forth in the preceding pages, and now the common property of all educated Englishmen, was then known only to perhaps a dozen journalists and politicians in England; and if these men had attempted to impart their knowledge to the general public, they would have failed from the sheer inability of the average Englishman to believe that "British subjects" under responsible government could be anything but loyal to the Imperial tie.
But little as Mr. Chamberlain knew of the real strength of the forces of Afrikander nationalism, he discerned enough of the South African situation to realise that this policy would have no chance of success, unless the maintenance of the British cause in South Africa was placed in the hands of a personality of exceptional vigour and capacity.
When, therefore, Lord Rosmead intimated his desire to be relieved of the heavy responsibility of the joint offices of High Commissionship for South Africa and Governor of the Cape Colony no attempt to dissuade him was made. His health had been enfeebled for some time past, and he did not long survive his return to England. Both in Australia and at the Cape he had devoted his strength and ability to the service of the Empire. In the years 1883-5 he had resolutely and successfully opposed the attempt of the Transvaal Boers to seize Bechua.n.a.land. His failure to control his powerful and impatient Prime Minister is mitigated by the circ.u.mstance that it was solely on the ground of public interest that, upon the retirement of Lord Loch in 1895, he had allowed himself, in spite of his advanced years and indifferent health, to a.s.sume the office of High Commissioner for a third time.
CHAPTER III
A YEAR OF OBSERVATION
Lord Rosmead retired early in 1897. It is said that three men so different in character as Lord Salisbury, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr.
Stead, each separately fixed upon the same name as being that of the man most capable of undertaking the position of High Commissioner in South Africa--a position always difficult, but now more than ever arduous and responsible. To nine out of every ten men with whom he had been brought into contact there was little in Sir Alfred Milner--as he then was--to distinguish him from other high-principled, capable, and pleasant-mannered heads of departments in the Civil Service. His _metier_ was finance, and his accomplishment literature. Commencing with journalism and an unsuccessful contest (in the Liberal interest) for the Harrow division of Middles.e.x, he had been private secretary to Lord Goschen, Under-Secretary for Finance in Egypt, and Head of the Inland Revenue. In this latter office he had given invaluable a.s.sistance to Sir William Harcourt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in respect of what is perhaps the most successful of recent methods of raising revenue--the death duties. The principle of the graduated death duties was Harcourt"s; but it was Milner who worked out the elaborate system which rendered his ideas coherent, and enabled them eventually to be put into effect. Academic distinctions, however ample, cannot be said to-day to afford a definite a.s.surance of pre-eminent capacity for the service of the State. Yet it was certainly no disadvantage to Sir Alfred Milner to have been a scholar of Balliol, or a President of the Oxford Union.[26] Whatever direct knowledge the educated public had of him was based probably upon the impression created by his book _England in Egypt_. This was a work which indicated that its author had formed high ideals of English statesmanship, and that his experience of a complex administrative system, working in a political society full of intrigue and international jealousy, had developed in him the rare qualities of insight and humour. Some of his readers might have reflected that an active a.s.sociation with so accomplished a master of financial and administrative method as Lord Cromer was in itself a useful equipment for a colonial administrator.
[Footnote 26: Mr. Bodley, in his _Coronation of King Edward VII._, remarks that of the seventy Balliol scholars elected during the mastership of Jowett (1870-1893) only three had at that time (1902) "attained eminence in any branch of public life." These three were Mr. H. H. Asquith, Dr. Charles Gore (then Bishop of Worcester), and Lord Milner.]
[Sidenote: Sir Alfred Milner.]
But the British public, both in England and South Africa, took their view of the appointment from the opinions expressed by the many prominent men to whom Sir Alfred Milner was personally known. The leaders and the Press of both parties were unstinted in approval of the choice which Mr. Chamberlain had made. The banquet given to Sir Alfred Milner three weeks before his departure to the Cape (March 28th, 1897) provided an occasion for an expression of unrestrained admiration and confidence unique in the annals of English public life.
"He has the union of intellect with fascination that makes men mount high," wrote Lord Rosebery. And Sir William Harcourt, "the most grateful and obliged" of Milner"s "many friends and admirers,"
p.r.o.nounced him to be "a man deserving of all praise and all affection." Mr. Asquith, who presided, stated in a speech marked throughout by a note of intimate friendliness that "no appointment of our time has been received with a larger measure both of the approbation of experienced men and of the applause of the public." The office itself was "at the present moment the most arduous and responsible in the administrative service of the country." Not only "embarra.s.sing problems," but "formidable personalities" would confront the new High Commissioner for South Africa:
"But," he added, "we know that he takes with him as clear an intellect and as sympathetic an imagination, and, if need should arise, a power of resolution as tenacious and as inflexible as belongs to any man of our acquaintance."
Milner"s reply is significant of the spirit in which he had undertaken his task. Like Rhodes, he had found in his Oxford studies the reasoned basis for an enlightened Imperialism. Chief among his earliest political convictions was the belief that--
"there was no political object comparable in importance with that of preventing a repet.i.tion of such a disaster [as the loss of the United States]: the severance of another link in the great Imperial chain.... It is a great privilege to be allowed to fill any position in the character of what I may be, perhaps, allowed to call a "civilian soldier of the Empire." To succeed in it, to render any substantial service to any part of our world-wide State, would be all that in any of my most audacious dreams I had ever ventured to aspire to. But in a cause in which one absolutely believes, even failure--personal failure, I mean, for the cause itself is not going to fail--would be preferable to an easy life of comfortable prosperity in another sphere."
[Sidenote: Personal traits.]
This was the man who was sent to maintain the interests of the paramount Power in a South Africa shaken by racial antagonism, and already feverish with political intrigue and commercial rivalry. Of all the tributes of the farewell banquet, Sir William Harcourt"s was closest to the life--"worthy of all praise and all affection." The quality of inspiring affection to which this impressive phrase bore witness was one which had made itself felt among the humblest of those who were fortunate enough to have been a.s.sociated with Lord Milner in any public work. Long after Milner had left Egypt, the face of the Syrian or Coptic Effendi of the Finance Department in Cairo would light up at the chance mention of the genial Englishman who had once been his chief. And in remote English counties revenue officials still hang his portrait upon the walls of their lodgings. Such men had no claim to appraise his professional merit or his gifts of intellect; but their feelings were responsive to the charm of his nature. "He was so considerate": that was their excuse for retaining his name and personality among the pleasant memories of the past. But the other side of Milner"s character, the power of "tenacious and inflexible resolution," of which Mr. Asquith spoke, was destined to be brought into play so prominently during the "eight dusky years" of his South African administration, that to the distant on-looker it came to be accepted as the characterising quality of the man. To some Milner became the "man of blood and iron"; determined, like Bismarck, to secure the unity of a country by trampling with iron-shod boots upon the liberties of its people: even as in the view of others his clear mental vision--never more clear than in South Africa--became clouded by an adopted partisanship, and he was a "lost mind." Nothing could be further from the truth. If the man lived who could have turned the Boer and Afrikander from hatred and distrust of England and English ideas by personal charm and honourable dealing, it was the man who had universally inspired all his former a.s.sociates, whether equals or subordinates, with admiration and affection. Whatever bitterness was displayed against Lord Milner personally by the Boer and Afrikander leaders after the issue of the war was decided was due to their perception that he was then--as always--a source of strength and an inspiration for renewed effort to those whom they regarded as their rivals or opponents. They hated him just as the French hated Bismarck--because he was the strong man on the other side.
Lord Milner"s inflexibility was, in its essence, a keener perception of duty than the ordinary: it was a determination to do what he believed to be for the good of South Africa and the Empire, irrespective of any consideration of personal or party relationship.
It was in no sense the incapacity to measure the strength of an opponent, still less did it arise from any failure to perceive the cogency of an opinion in conflict with his own. Before the eight years of his administration had pa.s.sed, Lord Milner"s knowledge of the needs of South Africa and the Empire had become so profound that it carried him ahead of the most enlightened and patriotic of the home statesmen who supported him loyally to the end. Through the period of the war, when the issues were simple and primitive, they were wholly with him.
But afterwards they supported him not so much because they understood the methods which he employed and the objects at which he aimed, as because they were by this time convinced of his complete mastery of the political and economic problems of South Africa. It is to this inability to understand the facts of the South African situation, as he had learnt them, that we must attribute the comparative feebleness shown by the Unionist leaders in resisting the perverse attempt which was made by the Liberal party, after the General Election of 1906, to revoke the final arrangements of his administration. The interval that separated Lord Milner"s knowledge of South Africa from that of the Liberal ministers was profound; but even the Unionist chiefs showed but slight appreciation of the una.s.sailable validity of the administrative decisions with which they had identified themselves, when the "swing of the pendulum" brought these decisions again, and somewhat unexpectedly, before the great tribunal of the nation.
[Sidenote: Arrival at Cape Town.]
Lord Milner sailed for the Cape on April 17th, 1897. At the actual moment of his arrival the relations between the Home Government and the South African Republic were strained almost to the breaking point.
In a peremptory despatch of March 6th, Mr. Chamberlain had demanded the repeal of the Aliens Immigration and Aliens Expulsion Laws of 1896--the former of which const.i.tuted a flagrant violation of the freedom of entry secured to British subjects by Article XIV. of the London Convention. This virtual ultimatum was emphasised by the appearance of a British squadron at Delagoa Bay, and by the despatch of reinforcements to the South African garrisons. The evident determination of the Imperial Government induced the Volksraad to repeal the Immigration Law and to pa.s.s a resolution in favour of amending the Expulsion Law. The crisis was over in June, and during the next few months the Pretoria Executive showed a somewhat more conciliatory temper towards the Government of Great Britain. And in this connection two other facts must be recorded. In August, 1896, Sir Jacobus de Wet had been succeeded as British Agent at Pretoria by Sir William (then Mr.) Conyngham Greene, and the Imperial Government was a.s.sured, by this appointment, of the services of an able man and a trained diplomatist. The Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the Raid, promised in July, 1896, met on February 16th, 1897, and reported on July 13th of the same year. Its report did little more than rea.s.sert the findings of the Cape Parliamentary Inquiry, which had been before the British public for the last year. It was otherwise remarkable for the handle which it gave (by the failure to insist upon the production of certain telegrams) to some extreme Radicals to a.s.sert Mr. Chamberlain"s "complicity" in the "invasion" of the Transvaal as originally planned by Mr. Rhodes.
[Sidenote: Milner"s thoroughness.]
Lord Milner had expressed his intention of acquainting himself with the conditions of South Africa by personal observation before he attempted to take any definite action for the solution of the problems awaiting his attention. Nor, after the first month of anxious diplomatic controversy with the Pretoria Executive, was there anything either in the political situation in the Cape Colony, or in the att.i.tude of the Transvaal Government, to prevent him from putting his purpose into effect. Apart from the circ.u.mstance that the reorganisation of the Chartered Company"s Administration--a question in which the political future of Mr. Rhodes was largely involved--was a matter upon which his observation and advice were urgently required by the Colonial Office, Lord Milner had no intention, as he said, of "being tied to an office chair at Capetown." He had resolved, therefore, to visit at the earliest opportunity, first, the country districts of the colony which formed the actual seat of the Dutch population, and, second, the two protectorates of Bechua.n.a.land and Basutoland, which were administered by officers directly responsible to the High Commissioner, as the representative of the Imperial Government. In point of fact he did more than this. Within a year of his arrival he had travelled through the Cape Colony (August and September, 1897), through the Bechua.n.a.land Protectorate and Rhodesia (November and December, 1897), and visited Basutoland (April, 1898).
And with characteristic thoroughness he set himself to learn both the Dutch of Holland and the "Taal"--the former in order that he might read the newspapers which the Afrikanders read, and the latter to open the way to that intercourse of eye and ear which most helps a man to know the character of his neighbour.
Lord Milner"s year of observation may be said to have ended with the speech at Graaf Reinet (March 3rd, 1898), which held his first clear and emphatic public utterance. During the greater part of this period he was by no means exclusively occupied with the shortcomings of President Kruger. The discharge of his official duties as Governor of the Cape Colony required more than ordinary care and watchfulness in view of the disturbed state of South African politics. And as High Commissioner he was called upon to deal with a number of questions relative to the affairs of Rhodesia and the Protectorates, of which some led him into the new and unfamiliar field of native law and custom, while others involved the exercise of his judgment on delicate matters of personal fitness and official etiquette. But an account of these questions--questions which he handled with equal insight and decision--must yield to the commanding interest of the actual steps by which he approached the two central problems upon the solution of which the maintenance of British supremacy in South Africa depended--the removal of the pernicious system of race oligarchy in the Transvaal, and the preservation of the Cape Colony in its allegiance to the British Crown.
[Sidenote: His friendliness to the Boers.]
The position which Lord Milner took up in his relations with the Transvaal Government was one that was consistent alike with his personal characteristics and with the dictates of a high and enlightened statesmanship. Within the first few weeks of his arrival he let it be known, both through the British Agent at Pretoria, and through those of the Afrikander leaders in the Cape Colony who were on terms of intimacy with President Kruger, that he desired, as it were, to open an entirely new account between the two governments. He, a new High Commissioner with no South African past, with no errors to retrieve, no failures to rankle, could afford to bury the diplomatic hatchet. There was nothing to prevent him from approaching the discussion of any questions that might arise in a spirit of perfect friendliness, or from believing that the President would be inspired, on his side, by the same friendly feelings. It was his hope, therefore, that much of the friction incidental to formal diplomatic controversy might be avoided through the settlement of all lesser matters by amicable and informal discussion between President Kruger and himself.