Note Back to Main Text — Chapter IX

The correspondence forwarded to the Colonial Office during the first half of the year 1900 by Lord Milner, and presented to the House of Commons in time for the Settlement debate of July 25th, furnishes a complete record of the origin of the "conciliation" movement. The whole of this interesting and significant collection of documents is worthy of attention; but all that can be done here is to direct the notice of the reader to one or two of its more salient features—features which illustrate the extraordinary condition of the Cape Colony, and explain how the disaffection of the Dutch subjects of the Crown was to be first aggravated, and then used as a means of saving the independence of the Republics. The position taken up by the Bond at the end of January (1900) in view of Mr. Schreiner's gradual conversion to the side of the Imperial Government, is sufficiently indicated in the resolution prepared for submission to the annual Congress, to which reference has been already[215] made. It was, in effect, a condemnation not only of the British Government, but of the Cape Government also, in so far as it had co-operated with the Imperial authorities, and a determination to prevent the war from being carried to a logical and successful conclusion by the incorporation of the Boer Republics into the system of British South Africa. The annual Congress, at which these opinions were to be affirmed, was announced to be held at Somerset East, on March 8th. Lord Milner, however, represented to Mr. Schreiner that it was very undesirable that such a demonstration should take place; and, through Mr. Schreiner's influence, the Congress was postponed. But the Prime Minister, in undertaking to use his influence with the Bond to prevent a denunciation of the policy of the Imperial Government at so critical a period, expressed the hope that the loyalists on their side would refrain from any public demonstration of an opposite character.