Amidst their recriminations and the publicity they could command from the Press, it is no wonder that Sir Alfred Milner felt bewildered.  It is to his everlasting honour that he did not allow himself to be overpowered.  He was polite to everybody; listened carefully to all the many wonderful tales that were being related to him, and, without compromising himself, proceeded to a work of quiet mental elimination that very soon made him thoroughly grasp the intricacies of any situation.  He quickly came to the conclusion that President Kruger was not the principal obstacle to a peaceful development of British Imperialism in South Africa.  If ever a conflict was foisted on two countries for mercenary motives it was the Transvaal War, and a shrewd and impartial mind like Milner’s did not take long to discover that such was the case.

He was not, however, a man capable of lending himself meekly to schemes of greed, however wilily they were cloaked.  His was not the kind of nature that for the sake of peace submits to things of which it does not approve.  This man, who was represented as an oppressor of the Dutch, was in reality their best friend, and perhaps the one who believed the most in their eventual loyalty to the English Crown.  It is a thousand pities that when the famous Bloemfontein Conference took place Sir Alfred Milner, as he still was at that time, had not yet acquired the experience which later became his concerning the true state of things in the Transvaal.  Had he at that time possessed the knowledge which he was later to gain, when the beginning of hostilities obliged so many of the ruling spirits of Johannesburg to migrate to the Cape, it is likely that he would have acted differently.  It was not easy for the High Commissioner to shake off the influence of all that he heard, whether told with a good or bad intention, and it was still harder for him in those first days of his office to discern who was right or who was wrong among those who crowded their advice upon him—­and never forgave him when he did not follow their ill-balanced counsels.

Concerning the outstanding personality of Cecil Rhodes, the position of Sir Alfred Milner was even more difficult and entangled than in regard to anyone else.  It is useless to deny that he had arrived at Cape Town with considerable prejudice against Rhodes.  He could not but look interrogatively upon the political career of a man who at the very time he occupied the position of Prime Minister had lent himself to a conspiracy against the independence of another land.  Moreover, Rhodes was supposed, perhaps not without reason, to be continually intriguing to return to power, and to be chafing in secret at the political inaction which had been imposed upon him, and for which he was himself responsible more than anyone else.  The fact that after the Raid Rhodes had been abandoned by his former friends harmed him considerably as a political man by destroying his renown as a statesman to whom the