F. Edmund Garrett

“ Armed with the proceeds of the fleecing, the Boer overlords, not yet prepared to dictate union on their own terms, were enforcing, at any rate, disunion and European intrigue as the alternative, and familiarizing young South Africa with the spectacle of British citizenship at a disadvantage. If the future was to be left to peaceful, natural forces, those forces must first be liberated. Such was the crux confronting Milner. The solution—'Equal rights for every civilized man'—had been formulated by Rhodes at the moment of his fall. ”

“ Critics suggest that if Milner at Bloemfontein had abandoned dialectics for true diplomacy—if Mr. Chamberlain somewhat later had said, 'Ah, my kind Christian friend!' instead of talking about a squeezed sponge—the prejudices dear to the strong old Dopper as life would have melted away.
Such critics do not know their Kruger nor their Boer. The Dutchman is not, like the Irishman, a creature of sentiment. Providence in its infinite indulgence has spared us the task of reconciling any race which combines both the Dutch and the Irish gifts of recalcitrance. ”

“ There is a sense in which I, for one, hope that dream will never die out, but that little by little, under the anodyne spell of free self-government, the sturdy souls who cherish it will come to feel that the dream is realized, as nearly as it could ever be outside dreamland, in a South Africa which is united, is a 'crowned Republic,' and is as much theirs as ours.
That lies on the knees of the gods. What is certain is that when Milner came on the scene the two wrestling ideals had reached deadlock. ”

“ A white man's living wage is just four to five times a Kaffir's. That is the gulf between the two standards of wants. Does anybody expect the working man to make it even a shilling less in the name of white immigration? Is the capitalist, then, expected in the same name to recast his business on the basis of paying a white man a minimum of nine or ten shillings a day for work the Kaffir does at two shillings?
Such are the heroic revolutions, social and economic, which it is suggested that Milner should have forced upon a staple industry in a time of struggling recovery after war. ”

“ To begin with, a White South Africa must be meaningless upon lips which in the same breath are for sweeping away as semi-servile the difference in status which white minority rule presupposes. What does a White South Africa mean, then, to South Africans? It means a South Africa of white civilization—white rulers and brain-workers and craftsmen, white professional and business men, white skilled workmen, white overseers of the unskilled. It has never yet meant a South Africa of white unskilled labour, whether British or other. ”

“ No one will deny that Equally, no one will assert that those measures could ever have passed the then existing Cape Parliament if the majority of Dutch members had stood to their own expressed views and sympathies. If Milner despaired of the Dutch majority, he had seen its chosen head, Mr. Schreiner, after efforts which Milner alone could estimate, despair of the Ministry which that majority had created. And no wonder! What sort of Treason Court could men be expected to set up to disfranchise their own constituents—in some cases to try themselves? ”

“ The tide is turning at last, but too late for many smaller men, and too late for Milner. The undertow has tired him out.
In irrigation, in forestry, in communications, above all, in land colonization, his full plans would have changed the face of the country. Some of them, perhaps, may never be realized now; the day of opulence will come, but not the day of opulent dictatorship; they will remain like those massive stone zimbabwes out in the African veld, which time and nature cannot obliterate, but on which posterity will never build. ”

“ Raid or no Raid, there was a sense, a somewhat tragic sense, in which Rhodes was always a man in a hurry. To the consciousness that life was not long enough for the chosen life-work there was added the knowledge that his own life was almost certain to be cut short. Not in the East only is man liable to receive in mid-career the sudden arbitrary-seeming message to bid everything good-bye. ”

“ Rhodes had disclosed his plans, and Sir Hercules Robinson had exacted guarantees that where he planted the flag Rhodes would follow. Something more was wanted than negatives to Kruger and proclamations of spheres. The north must be not only talked about, but taken—occupied, opened up, freed from the yoke of black militarism, settled, developed. Only so could a new world to redress the balance of the old, a counterpoise to the lost Eldorado of the Transvaal, be got ready to fling into the British scale on the day when South Africa should be ready to tremble into union one way or the other. ”

“ To be sure, they who write the papers do not always read them, or some able editors would know better than to denounce Milner for saying that there is no room in South Africa for a white proletariat. If Milner did say so, his infamy, as usual, is that of facing the facts. There is no room simply because the proletariat is there already, and is black. Africa is neither Europe nor quite Asia, but between the two. The population of South Africa, to the extent of some seven-eighths, consists of natives, mainly of negroid race, enjoying full physical vigour. ”

“ It is a bachelor white proletariat, then, that Milner is censured for not promoting. Strange, since the censors would have the Chinese coolie wived almost whether he will or no.
We can now sum up on the whole question of Milner's so-called capitalism. 'Hand and glove with capitalists' is the hostile phrase. Hand and glove with the mining industry would express his avowed policy; and we have traced its reasoned grounds. His work for the mines was as much for the miners as for their employers—nay, more, for to him the miners represent the British vote. ”

“ Why, for bold spirits like De Wet, that pan-South African Republic embracing the Colonies, that dream which, we are told, would have died out if we had but waited, was already no dream, but a living reality imposing an allegiance of its own and abrogating all others! ”

“ The engine-drivers and railway hands lived an epic of quiet everyday heroism. But in the ranks of labour in the Transvaal Milner did not find any advanced development either of union or of political leadership. ”

“ But my point is—and no one who knows the Cape lobbies and Cape constituencies will contest it—that these successive triumphs of the statesmanship of the odd-man-out on poll or division list amounted to a series of flukes, a run of luck, on which a betting man would not have cared without heavy odds to risk his money. Such a run might come off—it did come off; but in Milner's view it was not a thing on which he could advise the Home Government beforehand to stake vital interests. ”

“ To secure that the coming union should be within, not without the British Empire, and to inspire and weld into one convinced, high-tempered whole the British in South Africa, in Great Britain, and throughout the Empire, till that issue was decided—this chapter Milner completed; and any man might be content to live by it. ”

“ Against the employers evidence can be quoted out of their own mouths that they would rather not see too big a workman's vote along the Rand; they fear trades unions and labour politics. Milner's preoccupation was obviously something quite different: it was to balance the Boer vote at the poll, and nobody imagines that he counted on doing that with a register of millionaires.
Is it suggested, then, that he should not have taken counsel with the heads of the industry, but rather with the hands? That there is sterling stuff in the British mechanics of South Africa was proved in the war. ”

“ This may be nigh philosophy, but the truth is South Africa could no more afford to be philosophic about the Rand labour problem than Lancashire about a cotton shortage, or Wales about a coal strike. Equally, the political crisis could not wait. The necessary period of autocratic rule should be got through quickly and easily. To let depression drift unrelieved into bankruptcy was at once to make the period odious and indefinitely to prolong it. 'Obviously,' in Milner's own words, [4] 'the interest of the Mother Country must be to grant self-government as quickly and completely as possible' ”

“ Rhodes was given scant time to retrieve, but it was crowded with matter. The 'facing the music' at Westminster, the forlorn hope in Cape politics which his close friend was to take over and carry to success after his death, the peacemaking indaba in the Matoppos, the strangely appealing last scenes and legacy to Oxford and Empire—these are material for the biographer, to make his plot in sober truth more romantic than a novel, but must not tempt us away from the main thread of our story. We have traced the long career of patient reticence; we have tried to account for the one blunder of haste. ”

“ Such questions, I mean, as the war contribution, the 10 per cent. profit tax, or that novel and provident piece of State socialism which has secured to a Colony for the first time the lion's share of the profits of a diamond mine. The truth is that, especially in the Transvaal, the skilled workman is a bit of a capitalist himself, and the real dividing-line is between those in each class who have the quickening touch of public spirit and those who have not. Milner simply enlisted that spirit where he found it, disregarding class. ”

“ It is natural that the hostility should die harder in parts of the Empire which are innocent of colour problems, and therefore unhardened to the makeshifts which such problems everywhere impose. South Africans are familiar with a polity built in distinct layers and exhibiting the rights of man in distinct stages of development. People in England, and practically in Australia, are not. Allowance should be made for that. Are not most South Africans outside Natal anti-Indian? ”

“ The financial was only half Rhodes's idea; the other half, which led to his extraordinary career in Cape politics, was concerned with the men rather than the money—the men and the methods of pioneering. It was to draw in the adventurous youth of South Africa, Dutch as well as English, to his adventure under the Union Jack; it was to secure the Cape as a base for Imperial, as against Republican, expansion, by presenting Imperialism as Colonialism and working with colonists on colonial lines. ”

“ They echoed the cries, but stuck to business, and, on the whole, disappointed nobody except our own 'pro-Boers,' those strange persons who talk so much about 'miscalculations,' but who had to learn from the peace that it is they who miscalculated the Dutch temper, just as they learnt from the war that it is they who miscalculated the English. On the other hand, the quarter where economic disappointment was bound to tell most was among the Administration's natural friends. Johannesburg split into parties. ”

“ On this matter of faithful dealing one thing is certain. Let them say what they will of Rhodes, the charge of not being 'straight with the Dutch' is one which calumny itself can hardly bring against Milner. No husbanding influence, for him, at the price of a neglect of urgent duty. He had borne witness at the Jubilee to Dutch loyalty—the personal loyalty of Dutch colonists to Queen Victoria. ”

“ The economic crisis could not wait, because the commercial, industrial, even the agricultural, prosperity of the whole of South Africa is nowadays so bound up with that of the mining industry that, with the Rand halting, South Africa could not recover from the war. Some critics reason as if the country might have been kept waiting indefinitely for the ideal solution ”

“ A South-African-born colonist, full of old Barberton and Bush-veld memories, who risked his neck for politics in the reform days and is heart and soul in the future of the country. Most of the same claims can be made for others as typical, like Sir George Farrar and Mr. Abe Bailey. How many Rand working men have served so long a civic apprenticeship to the Transvaal? ”

“ There Rhodes's work could not be undone; and in population we were creeping up. But that was all neutralized by a singular racial disparity in political status; and here, as we have seen, the Rhodes method had broken down. On our part of the map the Dutch unit counted double: he was a citizen, even over-represented; on the Boer part of the map the Britisher was not allowed to count at all. The taxation without representation from which America revolted was a trifle beside the Outlander's. ”

“ Milner, like Rhodes on his death-bed, advocated that the Cape Constitution, which the war had practically suspended, should be suspended formally until the completion of the after-war settlement. The advice was overruled, and to-day we can all, wise after the event, prove the advice a mistake. Some mistakes there must be marked up against a man shouldering Milner's responsibilities in such a whirlpool of problems as the South Africa of the last eight years ”

“ All that was needed was to leave Boer and Outlander to stew in their own juice (well, in the Outlander's juice, at any rate) , and somehow, some day, freedom would have slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent. ”