energy, he insisted on and worked for a settlement by consent, with a formal promise of future self-government to the Boers.  In this he was in sharp opposition to Lord Milner, who desired to extort an unconditional surrender.  Of these two strong, able, high-minded men, the soldier, curiously enough, was the better statesman.  In temperament he recalls the General Abercromby of 1797 on the eve of the Irish rebellion, still more perhaps General Carleton, who administered French Canada in the critical period after its conquest and during the American War.  Lord Milner, in political theory, not in personality, corresponds to Fitzgibbon.  His view was that British prestige and authority could only be maintained in the future by thus humbling the national pride of our adversaries, who, moreover, by the formal annexations of 1900, carried into effect when the war was still young, were by a legal fiction rebels, not belligerents.  Lord Kitchener, besides seeing, as the responsible soldier in the field, the sheer physical impossibility of lowering the Boer national pride by any military operations he had the power to undertake, from the beginning of the guerilla war onwards, was a truer judge of human nature and a better Imperialist at heart in realizing that the self-respect of the Boers was a precious asset, not a dangerous menace to the Empire, and that the whole fate of South Africa depended on a racial reconciliation on the basis of equal political rights, which would be for ever precluded by compelling the Boers to pass under the Caudine Forks.

Fortunately Lord Kitchener was supported by the Home Government, and the Peace of Vereeniging took the form of a surrender on terms, or, virtually, of a treaty, formally guaranteeing, among other things, the concession “when circumstances should permit” of “representative institutions leading up to self-government.”  The next ordeal of British statesmanship came when the time arrived in 1905 to redeem this promise.  There were two distinctly defined alternatives:  one, to profit by experience and to give responsible government at once; the other, for the time being, to copy one of the constitutional models which had long been obsolete curiosities in the history of all the white Colonies, which had never failed to produce mischievous results, whether in a bi-racial or a uni-racial community, and which were in reality suited only to groups of officials and traders living in the midst of uneducated coloured races in tropical lands.  The Government, and we cannot doubt that their traditional policy toward Ireland warped their views, declared for the latter alternative, and issued under Letters Patent a Constitution which happily never came into force.  Like the Act of Union with Ireland, it gave the shadow of freedom without the substance.  It set up a single Legislative Chamber, four-fifths elective, but containing, as ex-officio members, the whole of the Executive Council as nominated by the Crown.  Executive power,