Notwithstanding the great brilliance of his intelligence and the strength of his mind, Cecil Rhodes will always be found inferior to the present Viscount Milner as a statesman.  Rhodes could not and would not wait.  Milner spent his whole existence in waiting, and waited so successfully that he lived to see the realisation of the plans which he had made and which so many, even among his friends, had declared to be quite impossible for him to realise.  Milner, about whose tact and mental greatness so many false notions existed in South Africa as well as elsewhere, had been the one man who had seen clearly the consequences of the war.  As he told me one day when we were talking about the regrettable race-hatred which lent such animosity to the struggle:  “It will cease sooner than one thinks.”

The wise administrator, who had studied human nature so closely as he had done politics, had based his judgments on the knowledge which he had acquired of the spirit of colonisation which makes Great Britain so superior to any other nation in the world, and his belief that her marvellous spirit of adaptation was bound to make itself felt in South Africa as it had elsewhere.  Sir Alfred Milner knew that as time went on the Afrikanders would realise that their erstwhile enemies had given them the position to which they had always aspired, a position which entitled them to take a place among the other great nations of the world.  He knew, too, that their natural spirit of pride and of vanity would make them cherish the Empire that had allowed them to realise their ambitions of the past.  Until the war they had been proud of their gold and of their diamonds; after the war they would be proud of their country.  And by the consciousness which would gradually come to them of the advantages which their Federation under the British flag had brought to them they would become also ardent British patriots—­blessing the day when, in a passing fit of insanity, goaded into it by people who had never seen clearly the situation, President Kruger had declared war on England.

INDEX

Africa, South, charm of, 22
      conquest of, 1
      drunkenness in, 223
      English colonists, 14
      prior to Boer War, 6
      Union of (see Union)

Afrikander Bond, 86, 99
      and Rhodes, 73, 82, 84
      and Sir A. Milner, 134

Afrikander party compel Rhodes’ resignation, 50
Aliwal North concentration camp, 182
America’s response to concentration camp appeal, 165

         B

Barkly West, Rhodes elected for, 28
Barnato, Barney, 24, 137
      his awe of Rhodes, 60
Beit, Alfred, 24
Bender, Rev. Dr., Chief Rabbi of Cape Town, 194
Bloemfontein, concentration camp at, 182, 184
Bloemfontein Conference, the, 13, 16, 140
      failure of, 67, 104
Boer War, concentration camps, 157 et seq.