W

I.-LORD MILNER.

WITH what a sigh of relief the news was received that Lord Milner actually was leaving South Africa-at long last! With what enthusiasm we shall all welcome home the man who for eight long years has strenuously done what he believed to be his best for his adopted country. And the warmth of our welcome will be all the greater because it is intended as a consolation for the failure which has attended his career. The most tragic figure of contemporary

history is that of

language, hobnobbing with Dutch Presidents, guaranteeing the loyalty of the Cape Dutch, and generally justifying the good opinion expressed by men of all shades of politics on his appointment.

It was in the same year that Nicholas II. launched the famous Rescript which was welcomed by the Peace Crusade and crowned by the Hague Conference. The young Russian Emperor was in that year the hero of the peace party, the heaven-sent champion of the cause of international brotherhood.

And now! Was there ever contrast more cruel

Nicholas II. Only second in pathetic interest is that of Lord Milner, the returning proconsul of South Africa. In the year 1898 both these men were hailed with enthusiasm as pillars of peace. Lord Milner had gone out to South Africa, with the support of both parties, under pledges of peace. So long as he was High Commissioner there was to be no breach with the Dutch. Those who had first nominated him for the post-at a time when he regarded the notion of his selection as the midsummer night's dream of a too partial friend and former colleague-did so because they believed that he could be absolutely relied upon to heal the breach made between the races in South Africa by the Jameson Raid, and to thwart any renewal of the efforts which Mr. Chamberlain had made in Lord Rosmead's time to plunge the Empire into war with the Transvaal. And at first Lord Milner appeared as if he were about to fulfil the confidence reposed in him by his oldest friends. In the year 1898 he was learning the Dutch

than that which exists between these fair visions of peace, progress, and reconciliation than that which is presented to us in what has happened in the subsequent history of both these forlorn and tragic figures? Of the two, the Tsar commands the greater sympathy because of the apparently wider sweep of his misfortunes. But the failure of Lord Milner is, when closely examined, the more piteous of the two. In the midst of the wreck of his hopes, the defeat of his army, the destruction of his navy, and the subterranean murmur of revolutionary discontent, the Tsar can at least point to one great triumph, the fame of which will be fresh when the memory of the carnage of Mukden is but as the horror of the far bloodier field of Chalons, where Attila fared like Kuropatkin, nearly fourteen centuries since. The first permanent International Tribunal that the world has ever seen owes its existence to his initiative. No subsequent failure, no weakness at home,

no disaster abroad can rob Nicholas II. of the position as benefactor of humanity secured by that great service. Nor can it be asserted, even by his worst enemy, that he willed the war with Japan. On the contrary he, weakly, it may be, but passionately longed for peace, longed for it so sincerely that he utterly failed to realise that the Japanese, who had the Russians in the hollow of their hand, were in no mood to forego the advantage of their position. Down to the very attack on his fleet he was confident that he would be allowed time in which to concede with dignity that which would satisfy the Japanese. It was a terrible miscalculation, for which he and Russia are paying a heavy price. But to be overwhelmed in a war against your will merely because you forgot the warning to agree with your adversary quickly while you are in the way with him, is a very different thing from deliberately making war as a matter of calculation and of policy.

THE AUTHOR OF THE WAR.

It is that which makes the figure of Lord Milner so much more pathetic than that of the Tsar. We see both men as the foremost figures against a background of war. But in Lord Milner's case there is no redeeming triumph, like the constitution of the Hague Tribunal, to alleviate the black and bloody horror of the desolation which he made in the particular portion of the earth entrusted to his care. Nor can Lord Milner, like the Tsar, plead that he was all unwittingly and unwillingly swept into the maelström of war. For Lord Milner willed the war with the Dutch Republics; he made the war; it was his war far more than Mr. Chamberlain's or Mr. Rhodes's. If he cannot say, "Alone I did it!" he can at least claim with confidence that he willed it, he planned it, he forced it upon the Home Government, and that but for his implacable resolve there would have been no war. And, therefore, it is that in contemplating the absolute failure of his administration in South Africa he seems to us a more melancholy and a much more guilty figure than the Tsar.

No one regards Lord Milner with greater affection and sympathy than the writer of these lines. I write of him and think of him as if he were my own brother. No one ever believed more in him than I did, or than as, in a sense, I do still. But alas no personal affection, no intensity of conviction as to his public spirit and disinterested patriotism, can blind-me to the fact that his pro-consulship, no matter how magnificent his ideals, has been, from first to last, an immense Imperial disaster.

ITS GERMAN ORIGIN.

When I ask myself how it came to pass that a man of such lofty character, of such noble ideals, and of such enthusiastic devotion to the Empire could have been so amazingly misled, I can only suggest one explanation. Lord Milner, with all his many excellences, was in temperament, as he was by birth, a German, and not a Briton. His political ideals, even

his social ideals, were German rather than English. He was, and is, a German subject. His father was a German, who at the time of the son's birth was holding a professorship in a German university to which only German subjects can be appointed. His mother, an Irish lady, was in Germany when Alfred Milner first saw the light. If he cannot be said to have sucked in German ideas with his mother's milk, he was cradled in Germany. He learned to lisp in German, and it was in Germany that the foundations of his <ducation were laid. Afterwards he was sent to England for schooling and for university training, but he remained, and remains to this day, essentially German in his ideals, both social and Imperial. When we were at the Pall Mall Gazette together the German "Socialists of the Chair" were his avowed leaders in the campaign which he made in favour of municipal socialism. When he got out to Africa the German Imperial idea immediately asserted itself. Hence the war and all that followed.

A BRUMMAGEM BISMARCK.

I am not mentioning the German origin and character and nationality of Lord Milner as a matter of reproach. It may, indeed, be regarded from some points of view as a compliment. The Germans are, in some matters, far ahead of the Britons, and I am the last man in the world to object to a foreigner being permitted to govern any part of the British Empire. We profited too much by allowing the Dutch William to sit on the British throne for me to complain that a non-naturalised German subject has been for eight years High Commissioner of South Africa. But just as it was necessary, for the Whigs of 1688 to remember that William of Orange was a Dutchman, so we ought not to have forgotten, when we sent Lord Milner out to South Africa, that he was au fond a German of the Germans, and a German, moreover, who, in the most impressionable years of his youth, had witnessed the unfolding with triumphant success of the Bismarckian policy of Blood and Iron.

FALSE TO THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

Lord Milner brought a German mind saturated in German precedents to the problem of the British Empire in South Africa. He forgot what Mr. Chamberlain has only this year discovered--that the British Empire is not an empire at all in the German and generally accepted sense of that word. The socalled British Empire is the loosest conceivable association rather than federation of absolutely independent self-governed Republics. These independent sister nations have not only the right to make their own laws, they can also place prohibitive import duties on the goods of the Mother Country; they can, if they please, refuse to take part in any Imperial war, and they have an unlimited right of secession. The British Empire is indeed the last word of Liberty in relation to the association under a common flag of independent States. It was just because Lord Milner never realised this, or realised it only with the

determination to destroy it and replace it by an Empire of the German type, that all our troubles arose in South Africa.

THE BRITISH COURSE.

Had

If Lord Milner had been British, of the true British Imperial breed, he would at once, on arriving in South Africa, have set himself to convince our fellow-subjects in South Africa that they were as free and independent as our fellow-subjects in Canada and Australia. he done so, there would have been an immediate easing of the heated bearings in the machinery of South African administration. The difficulty with. which we had to cope was the natural suspicion and alarm excited in the mind of President Kruger by the invasion of the Transvaal as the result of a conspiracy hatched under the wing of the Colonial Secretary. It was the conviction that Mr. Chamberlain privy to the Rhodesian conspiracy, and the belief that as a consequence Mr. Rhodes had Mr. Chamberlain at his mercy, that led the Dutch Republics to arm. if Lord Milner had sought to convince them that he would not take any action except with the support and on the advice of his Ministers in the Cape and in Natal, there would have been an immediate "let up" in the Armament policy.

THE BISMARCKIAN.

was

Unfortunately, he pursued an exactly opposite course. Instead of regarding himself as a Governor-General would regard himself in Canada, as a kind of constitutional monarch who is impotent to act except on the advice of his Ministers, Lord Milner almost from the first acted as if he possessed an independent authority emanating from outside South Africa. That assumption was fatal to any hope of conciliation. If he did not represent his constitutional advisers he represented Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Chamberlain, as no one knew better than Lord Milner, was believed by everyone in South Africa-Dutch and Rhodesian alike-to have been up to the neck in the conspiracy which culminated in the Raid. It was as Mr. Chamberlain's mouthpiece he acted independently of his advisers. And by so acting he directly and consciously accelerated the armaments of the Boers.

I must do Lord Milner the justice of admitting that he regarded from the first with lordly scorn the miserable sophistries and contemptible subterfuges about suzerainty and cruelty to natives and the other impudent pretences by which Mr. Chamberlain and his allies deluded the British public into condoning the war upon which Lord Milner had decided for other reasons. Lord Milner's decision to force war upon the Republics was taken long before Mr. Chamberlain could be brought to see that he must draw the sword. The reasons for his decision were German reasons, resting on German precedent.

WHY HE MADE WAR.

He found himself confronted by a situation not unlike that which confronted Bismarck in the early

sixties. Owing to the Raid, as he frankly admitted, the Republics had armed; but he believed their armaments were not sufficient to enable them to defy the Empire. They were, however, as things stood, in a position to dominate South Africa. The British Colonies could only exist on sufferance if reinforced from over sea. Such a position was intolerable. Therefore, so Lord Milner argued, we had come to a parting of the ways. We must either attack and disarm the Boers, or we must meet armaments by armaments. If we adopt the former policy, then we may banish militarism from South Africa, and organise the whole of Austral Africa on the same principles of peaceful federation as have banished militarism and armed frontiers from the American Republic. If, on the other hand, we meet armaments by armaments, then we shall reproduce in these newly-peopled colonies the worst evils of the armed anarchy of the Old World. The Cape will have to fortify its frontier against the Orange Free State, and Natal against the South African Republic, and some system of universal military service will inoculate the nascent Empire with the virus of militarism. America or Europe, which shall it be? Lord Milner decided the question conscientiously, and from the highest motives-for I do not for one moment believe that any sordid dream of seizing the Rand sullied the purity of his ideal. He decided, as Bismarck might have decided in similar circumstances, that the best thing to do was to compel the Boers to disarm. He shrugged his shoulders, as Bismarck might have done, when it was pointed out that their armaments were the result of our own misdoings, and replied that it might be so, but as practical statesmen we had to deal with results, not to sit in judgment as to their causes. And so he deliberately made up his own mind that he would use his position as High Commissioner to compel ! the Imperial Government to adopt a policy towards the Transvaal which would enable him to enforce disarmament. I do not say that he consciously decided in cold blood to make war upon the Boers. I do say, without fear of contradiction either from Lord Milner himself, or from anyone who knows the facts, that he did deliberately decide upon a policy which he knew involved a possibility of war, but that risk he was fully determined to take.

HOW HE SILENCED DOUBTERS.

At first he met with great obstacles. An acquaintance, who congratulated him upon the support he received from Downing Street, was startled when told somewhat bitterly, "I receive no support from Downing Street, least of all from Mr. Chamberlain." But Lord Milner is a man of great ingenuity and resource. He was an old Pall Mall-er, and when we were at Northumberland Street the opposition of Downing Street was regarded merely as a thing to be overcome. Lord Milner knew how faithfully we were true to the old Pall Mall doctrine of the Free Hand and the Blind Eye. Those who were resolute