Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XI

As a declaration to the British world that Lord Milner "possessed the unabated confidence of his sovereign and of his fellow countrymen," Mr. Chamberlain's luncheon was amply justified. The protraction of the war was beginning to try the endurance of the nation. Mr. Sauer and Mr. Merriman were in England for the express purpose of discrediting Lord Milner, and behind these fierce political freelances was the astute brain of the Bond Master, Hofmeyr. They had been commissioned early in the year by the Afrikander nationalists to give effect to the resolutions of the Worcester Congress by co-operating with their friends in England in an agitation for the recall of the High Commissioner. It was said that these two ex-ministers of the Crown were authorised to offer an undertaking that the Bond would use its influence with ex-President Krüger and Mr. Fischer[292] to terminate the war, in exchange for the promise of "autonomy" for the Boers and a general armistice for the Cape rebels. However this may be, the delegates of the Worcester Congress made it their chief business to represent to the members of the Liberal party who favoured their cause, that the recall of Lord Milner would remove the chief obstacle to peace. This attempt never came within a measurable distance of success; but its failure was not due to any want of effort on the part of that section of the Liberal opposition which had been opposed to the annexation of the Republics, and now denounced the British Government and the Imperial troops for their "methods of barbarism." Liberals and Afrikanders. The completeness with which Lord Courtney, Mr. Bryce, Mr. Lloyd-George, Lord Loreburn (Sir Robert Reid), Mr. Burns, and other prominent members of the Liberal party identified themselves with the policy and action of the Afrikander Bond, is disclosed by the proceedings which marked the banquet given on June 5th in honour of Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer. Mr. Bryce, in a letter expressing his approbation of the object of the banquet and his regret at his inability to attend it, wrote: "Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer have not only distinguished public records, but did excellent service, for which the Government ought to have been grateful, in allaying passion and averting disturbances in Cape Colony."[293] Lord (then Mr.) Courtney, in proposing a vote of thanks to the guests of the evening, declared that the annexation of the Republics was "a wrong and a blunder"; adding that the Liberal policy would some day be "to temper annexation, if not to abrogate it." Both Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer revealed the aims of their mission with perfect frankness. The former, after alluding to Mr. Chamberlain's luncheon as a display of the "Imperial spirit of the servile senate who decreed ovations and triumphs to Caligula and Domitian, when they had received rebuffs from the ancestors both of ourselves and the heroic Dutch now struggling in South Africa," and characterising Lord Milner's High Commissionership as "a career of unmitigated and hopeless failure," proceeded to demand his immediate recall. To employ Lord Milner in the settlement of the new colonies, said Mr. Merriman, would be "a suicidal and ruinous policy. He was a violent partizan; his predictions never came true; the bursts of fustian and the frivolous utterances of his despatches showed an ill-balanced and ill-regulated mind, which was utterly unable to cope with the problem." While, as for the prospect of a British army ever conquering the South African Dutch, he reasserted the opinion which he held before the war—"Our friends they might be, but our subjects never."[294] Mr. Sauer, who "felt honoured by seeing such a gathering, and seeing in it a Gladstone[295] and a Leonard Courtney," was no less explicit: