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 applied from without. Before the negotiations it was arguable that the Boer might surrender his monopoly without the war alternative. The negotiations made it clear that he would only surrender it on that alternative; the war, that he preferred the alternative to the surrender. Milner, with that keen level gaze of his, foresaw as much from the moment when the old Boer and the young faced him across the table at Bloemfontein. He read the old peasant who had grown gray in evading and defying England by turns. He read the educated young Afrikander, the acrid little Republican who accompanied Mr. Kruger as lawyer-clerk, and whose almost cynical burlesque of a charter of enfranchisement was ready cut and dry in their pockets. He came out and paced alone for some time, grave and very pale. Should he, as men who were the eyes and the voice of England had felt bound to do before him, join in a paper make-believe, throw upon Time the onus of proving paper to be only paper, and so put off the evil day? 'After all,' a shrewd Dutch leader remarked to me at that time, 'his diplomatic reputation depends on his getting something out of the old man and putting the best face on it' Milner considered all that while he paced, pale and solitary, with bent head. Then he re-entered the Conference room, firm and erect. His verdict was formed—'complete failure,' as he telegraphed to a friend—and his diplomatic reputation must just fare as it might. All that remained now, beyond certain talk, was to make the Boers feel that, give or refuse, they could no longer evade: refusal would mean playing double or quits for South Africa. He made them feel it. They decided, as they had the right to do, to play; and they lost.

The next period of Milner's career bristles with controversy, only less than the period leading up to the war; and I wish to grapple with the points most controverted first. Let us begin with his advice on the Suspension Question. Milner, like Rhodes on his death-bed, advocated that the Cape Constitution, which the