Note Back to Main Text — Chapter V

This 19th of July was a dark day for the High Commissioner. In the morning came Mr. Chamberlain's telegram with its ominous suggestion of a change for the worse in the attitude of the Home Government. And this change in the Cabinet was, as Lord Milner knew, only the natural reflection of a wider change, which had manifested itself among the supporters of the Government and in the country at large since the publication, on June 14th, of his despatch of May 4th. Private letters had made him aware that to men to whom Dutch ascendancy at the Cape and Boer tyranny in the Transvaal, Afrikander nationalism and Boer armaments, were meaningless expressions, his resolute advocacy of the Uitlanders' cause and his frank presentation of the weakness of Great Britain had seemed the work of a disordered imagination or a violent partisanship. Nor was his knowledge of the relapse in England limited to the warnings or protests of his private friends. The South African News, the ministerial organ, which of late had filled its columns with adverse criticisms taken from the London Press, this morning contained a bitter article on him reprinted from Punch, which had arrived by the yesterday's mail. After all, it seemed, the long struggle against mis-government in the Transvaal was going to end in failure; and the British people would once more be befooled. With such thoughts in his mind, Lord Milner must have found the work of making up the weekly despatches for the Colonial Office—for it was a Wednesday[116]—a wearisome and depressing task. The mail was detained until long past the customary hour. But before it left, in spite of discouragement and anxiety, Lord Milner had gathered together into a brief compass all the documents necessary to put Mr. Chamberlain in possession of every material fact relative to the new law—passed only on the day before—and to the proceedings of the Transvaal Executive and the Volksraad between the 12th and the 19th. And, in addition to this, he had written a fresh estimate of the Franchise Bill in its latest form, in which he emphasised his former verdict that the proposals which it contained were not such as the Uitlanders would be likely to accept. And in particular he pointed out that the fact of the final amendment being thus readily adopted by the Volksraad disposed of the contention, upon which President Krüger had laid so much stress at Bloemfontein, that his "burghers" would not permit him to make the concessions which the British Government required. He wrote: