Page:The empire and the century.djvu/540

 British people in its great issue with the Boer people. Precisians used to shake their heads over the phrase 'Milner's policy.' 'Say Salisbury's policy, Chamberlain's policy, the Government's policy,' cried they; 'but Milner's? Grossly unconstitutional!' Perhaps; but the phrase roughly embodied the facts, which were made, not by lawyers, but by the unusual moment and man. Milner's has been as individual a path among our civil servants as that of Rhodes among our politicians. Each had his day of dictatorship in the old Roman sense—a broad commission to see that the Imperial Commonwealth took no hurt.

In short, it is as unreasonable to blame Milner for not conciliating the Dutch into Imperialism in 18971899 as it is to blame him for not coaxing Mr. Kruger into abdication when in June, 1899, at last they came to conference. 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. Our redoubtable Dutch fellow-subject is a practical fellow. He knows what he wants. Give it him, and you may call him a squeezed sponge or a scalene triangle, and welcome. Insist on his giving it to you, and he will dislike you, even if you say that he prevail and sing more sweetly than the nightingale. The most that can be expected of him is to admit of Milner, as the schoolboy of Dr. Temple, 'A beast, but a just beast.' One half South Africa learnt to regard Milner's character with love and reverence. With wounds yet fresh, it was not in human nature that the feeling of the other half should be the same; but if with