Page:The empire and the century.djvu/552

. One escape there was—yes. Wrapping our white robes about us, we might beat a hasty retreat, and 'throw the responsibility on the colonists' own shoulders.' Such a way of 'saving face' would have secured comfort, it seems, to some British consciences. It would have been, at any rate, appropriately Chinese. I have written in vain if the reader needs any exposition why it was not recommended by Milner.

'This is all very well, but hard logic isn't everything. We thought the war was to make South Africa free and British, and now the white South Africa we have heard of turns out to be a community propped up on black and yellow labour!' The appeal, like Mr. Swinburne's 'Before a Crucifix,' is poignant:

But behind it there is a perfect ganglion of misconceptions. To begin with, a White South Africa must be meaningless upon lips which in the same breath are for sweeping away as semi-servile the difference in status which white minority rule presupposes. What does a White South Africa mean, then, to South Africans? It means a South Africa of white civilization—white rulers and brain-workers and craftsmen, white professional and business men, white skilled workmen, white overseers of the unskilled. It has never yet meant a South Africa of white unskilled labour, whether British or other. Can anyone honestly say that he rushed to arms for the late war on some prospectus of a White South Africa in this latter sense? If so, he was the dupe of his own singular misinformation. In these days the more elementary facts and figures about the Colonies are iterated in school primers and tit-bitted in the papers. To be sure, they who write the papers do not always read them, or some able editors would know better than to denounce Milner for saying that there is no room in South Africa for a white proletariat. If Milner did say so, his infamy, as usual, is that of facing