It was next to an impossibility to judge a man fairly under such conditions.  All that one could say was that he deserved a good deal of praise for having, so successfully as he did, steered through the manifold difficulties and delicate susceptibilities with which he had to contend in unravelling a great tangle in the history of the British Empire.

The Afrikander Bond hated him, that was a recognised fact, but this hatred did Sir Alfred more good than anything else.  The attacks directed against him were so mean that they only won him friends among the very people to whom his policy had not been acceptable.  The abuse showered by certain newspapers upon the High Commissioner not only strengthened his hands and his authority, but transformed what ought to have remained a personal question into one in which the dignity as well as the prestige of the Empire was involved.  To have recalled him after he had been subjected to such treatment would have been equivalent to a confession that the State was in the wrong.  I have never been able to understand how men of such undoubted perception as Mr. Sauer or Mr. Merriman, or other leaders of the Bond, did not grasp this fact.  Sir Alfred himself put the aspect very cleverly before the public in an able and dignified speech which he made at the lunch offered to Lord Roberts by the Mayor and Corporation of Cape Town when he said, “To vilify her representative is a strange way to show one’s loyalty to the Queen.”

A feature in Sir Alfred Milner’s character, which was little known outside the extremely small circle of his personal friends, was that when he was in the wrong he never hesitated to acknowledge the fact with straightforward frankness.  His judgments were sometimes hasty, but he was always willing to amend an opinion on just grounds.  There was a good deal of dogged firmness in his character, but not a shred of stubbornness or obstinacy.  He never yielded one inch of his ground when he believed himself to be in the right, but he was always amenable to reason, and he never refused to allow himself to be convinced, even though it may be that his natural sympathies were not on the side of those with whom he had got to deal.  Very few statesmen could boast of such qualities, and they surely ought to weigh considerably in the balance of any judgment passed upon Viscount Milner.

The welfare of South Africa and the reputation of Sir Alfred would have been substantially enhanced had he been able to assert his own authority according to his own judgment, without overrulings from Whitehall, and with absolute freedom as to choice of colleagues.  His position was most difficult, and though he showed no outward sign of this fact, it is impossible to believe that he did not feel its crushing weight.  Between the Bond, Mr. Hofmeyr, the race hatred which the Dutch accused him of fomenting, the question of the refugees, the clamours of the Jingo Colonials, and the extreme seriousness of the military situation