Note Back to Main Text — Chapter IX

There is one other fact which is disclosed by this official correspondence from the High Commissioner to the Secretary of State which cannot be overlooked. Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer both repudiated absolutely President Krüger's statement that Mr. Hargrove "had come here [i.e. to Pretoria], as he says, from Sauer and Merriman." In view of this repudiation, it is somewhat startling to find that the letters covering the minutes of the conciliation meetings, forwarded to Lord Milner from time to time with the request that they may be sent on to the Colonial Office, bear the signature of Mr. Albert Cartwright, as honorary secretary of the Conciliation Committee of South Africa. Mr. Albert Cartwright was editor of The South African News—that is to say, of the journal which, as we have noticed before, served as the medium for the expression of the political views of Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer. At the period in question The South African News rendered itself notorious by circulating the absurd, but none the less injurious, report that General Buller and his army had surrendered to the Boers in Natal and agreed to return to England on parole; by publishing stories of imaginary Boer victories; by eulogising Mr. Hargrove, whose acceptance of the £1,000 from the Netherlands Railway it definitely denied; and by its persistent and vehement denunciations of Lord Milner. At a later period Mr. Cartwright was convicted of a defamatory libel on Lord Kitchener, and condemned to a term of imprisonment.[221]