The conditions under which Sir Alfred Milner found
himself compelled to shape his policy of conciliation were beset with
obstacles and difficulties. An understanding of these is indispensable to
the one who would read aright the history of that period of Imperial
evolution.
The question of the refugees who overwhelmed Cape
Colony with their lamentations, after they had been obliged to leave the
Transvaal at the beginning of the hostilities—the claims of the Rand
multi-millionaires—the indignation of the Dutch Colonists confined in
concentration camps by order of the military authorities—the Jingoes who
thought it would be only right to shoot down every Dutch sympathiser in the
country: these were among the things agitating the South African public
mind, and setting up conflicting claims impossible of adjustment without
bitter censure on one hand or the other. The wonder is that, amid all these
antagonistic elements, Sir Alfred Milner contrived to fulfil the larger part
of the tasks which he had sketched out for himself before he left England.
The programme which Sir Alfred planned to carry out
proved, in the long run, to have been thoroughly sound in conception and
practice, because it contained in embryo all the conditions under which
South Africa became united. It is remarkable, indeed, that such a very short
time after a war which seemed altogether to have compromised any hope of
coalescing, the Union of South Africa should have become an accomplished
fact.
Yet, strange as it may appear, it is certain that up to
his retirement from office Sir Alfred Milner was very little known in South
Africa. He had been so well compelled by force of circumstances to lead an
isolated life that very few had opportunity to study his character or gain
insight into his personality. In Cape Town he was judged by his policy.
People forgot that all the time he was at Government House, Cape Town, he
was a man as well as a politician: a man whose efforts and work in behalf of
his country deserved some kind of consideration even from his enemies. It is
useless to discuss whether Sir Alfred did or did not make mistakes before
the beginning of the war. Why waste words over events which cannot be
helped, and about which there will always be two opinions? Personally, I
think that his errors were essentially of the kind which could not have been
avoided, and that none of them ever compromised ultimately the great work
which he was to bring to a triumphant close.
What I do think it is of value to point out is the
calmness which he contrived always to preserve under circumstances which
must have been particularly trying for him. Another outstanding
characteristic was the quiet dignity with which he withstood unjustifiable
attacks when dealing with not-to-be-foreseen difficulties which arose while
carrying on his gigantic task. Very few would have had the courage to remain
silent and undaunted whilst condemned or judged for things he had been
unable to alter or to banish. And yet this was precisely the attitude to
which Sir Alfred Milner faithfully adhered. It stands out among the many
proofs which the present Viscount Milner has given of his strong character
as one of its most characteristic features, for it affords a brilliant
illustration of what will, mastered by reason, can do.
Since those perilous days I have heard many differing
criticisms of Lord Milner's administration as High Commissioner in South
Africa. What those who express opinions without understanding that which
lies under the surface of history fail to take into account is the peculiar,
almost invidious position and the loneliness in which Sir Alfred had to
stand from the very first day that he landed in Table Bay. He could not make
friends, dared not ask anyone's advice, was forced always to rely entirely
upon his own judgment. He would not have been human had he not sometimes
felt misgivings as to the wisdom of what he was doing. He never had the help
of a Ministry upon whom he could rely or with whom he could sympathise. The
Cabinet presided over by Sir Gordon Sprigg was composed of very
well-intentioned men. But, with perhaps one single exception, it did not
possess any strongly individualistic personage capable of assisting Sir
Alfred in framing a policy acceptable to all shades of public opinion in the
Colony, or even to discuss with him whether such a policy could have been
invented. As for the administration of which Mr. Schreiner was the head, it
was distinctly hostile to the policy inaugurated by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain,
which Sir Alfred represented. Its members, indeed, put every obstacle in the
Governor's way, and this fact becoming known encouraged a certain spirit of
rebellion among the Dutch section of the population. Neither one Ministry
nor the other was able to be of any serious use to Milner, who, thus
hampered, could neither frame a programme which accorded with his own
judgment nor show himself in his true light.
All these circumstances were never taken into
consideration by friends or foes, and, in consequence, he was made
responsible for blunders which he could not help and for mistakes which he
was probably the first to deplore. The world forgot that Sir Alfred never
really had a free hand, was always thwarted, either openly or in secret, by
some kind of authority, be it civil or military, which was in conflict with
his own.
It was next to an impossibility to judge a man fairly
under such conditions. All that one could say was that he deserved a good
deal of praise for having, so successfully as he did, steered through the
manifold difficulties and delicate susceptibilities with which he had to
contend in unravelling a great tangle in the history of the British Empire.
The Afrikander Bond hated him, that was a recognised
fact, but this hatred did Sir Alfred more good than anything else. The
attacks directed against him were so mean that they only won him friends
among the very people to whom his policy had not been acceptable. The abuse
showered by certain newspapers upon the High Commissioner not only
strengthened his hands and his authority, but transformed what ought to have
remained a personal question into one in which the dignity as well as the
prestige of the Empire was involved. To have recalled him after he had been
subjected to such treatment would have been equivalent to a confession that
the State was in the wrong. I have never been able to understand how men of
such undoubted perception as Mr. Sauer or Mr. Merriman, or other leaders of
the Bond, did not grasp this fact. Sir Alfred himself put the aspect very
cleverly before the public in an able and dignified speech which he made at
the lunch offered to Lord Roberts by the Mayor and Corporation of Cape Town
when he said, "To vilify her representative is a strange way to show one's
loyalty to the Queen."
A feature in Sir Alfred Milner's character, which was
little known outside the extremely small circle of his personal friends, was
that when he was in the wrong he never hesitated to acknowledge the fact
with straightforward frankness. His judgments were sometimes hasty, but he
was always willing to amend an opinion on just grounds. There was a good
deal of dogged firmness in his character, but not a shred of stubbornness or
obstinacy. He never yielded one inch of his ground when he believed himself
to be in the right, but he was always amenable to reason, and he never
refused to allow himself to be convinced, even though it may be that his
natural sympathies were not on the side of those with whom he had got to
deal. Very few statesmen could boast of such qualities, and they surely
ought to weigh considerably in the balance of any judgment passed upon
Viscount Milner.
The welfare of South Africa and the reputation of Sir
Alfred would have been substantially enhanced had he been able to assert his
own authority according to his own judgment, without overrulings from
Whitehall, and with absolute freedom as to choice of colleagues. His
position was most difficult, and though he showed no outward sign of this
fact, it is impossible to believe that he did not feel its crushing weight.
Between the Bond, Mr. Hofmeyr, the race hatred which the Dutch accused him
of fomenting, the question of the refugees, the clamours of the Jingo
Colonials, and the extreme seriousness of the military situation at one
time, it was perfectly marvellous that he did not break down. Instead, as
very few men could have done, he kept a clear-headed shrewdness, owing to
which the Empire most certainly contracted an immense debt of gratitude
toward him for not having allowed himself to yield to the temptation of
retaliating upon those who had made his task such a particularly hard one.
His forbearance ought never to be lost sight of in judging the circumstances
which brought about and attended the South African War. Whilst the war was
going on it was not realised that Sir Alfred Milner was the only man
who—when the time arrived—could allay the passions arising from the
conflict. But, without vanity, he knew, and could well afford to wait for
his reward until history rather than men had judged him.
In the meanwhile Sir Alfred had to struggle against a
sea of obstacles in which he was probably the only man clever enough not to
drown himself—a danger which overtook others who had tried to plunge into
the complicated politics of South Africa. A succession of administrators at
Government House in Cape Town ended their political career there, and left,
broken in spirit, damaged in reputation.
As for the local politicians, they were mostly honest
mediocrities or adventurous spirits, who used their influence for their
personal advantage. An exception was Mr. Hofmeyr. But he was far too
absorbed in securing the recognition of Dutch supremacy at the Cape to be
able to work on the milder plane necessary to bring about the one great
result. The popularity of Mr. Hofmeyr was immense and his influence
indisputable; but it was not a broad influence. He shuddered at the mere
possibility of the Transvaal falling into the hands of the British.
Whilst touching upon the subject of the Transvaal, I
may say a word concerning the strangely mixed population, for the sake of
whom, officially, Britain went to war. The war was entirely the work of the
Uitlanders, as they called themselves with a certain pride, but very few of
whom possessed a drop of English blood. The British public at home was told
that it was necessary to fight President Kruger because Englishmen in the
Transvaal were being ill-treated and denied their legitimate rights. In
reality, this was one of those conventional reasons, lacking common sense
and veracity, upon which nations are so often fed. If we enter closely into
the details of existence in the Transvaal, and examine who were those who
shouted so loudly for the franchise, we find that the majority were either
foreigners or Jews hailing from Frankfurt or Hamburg. Many of them had, to
be sure, become naturalised British subjects, but I doubt very much whether,
among all the magnates of Johannesburg or of Kimberley, more than one or two
pure-blooded Englishmen could be found. Rhodes, of course, was an exception,
but one which confirmed the rule. Those others whose names can still be
conjured with in South Africa were Jews, mostly of Teutonic descent, who
pretended that they were Englishmen or Colonials; nothing certain was known
about their origin beyond the fact that such or such small shops in
Grahamstown, Durban or Cape Town had witnessed their childish romps. The
Beits, the Neumanns and the Wernhers were German Jews; Barney Barnato was
supposed to have been born under the shade of a Portuguese synagogue, and
considered the fact as being just as glorious a one as would have been that
of having in his veins "all the blood of all the Howards." The Joels were
Hebrews; the Rudds supposed to belong to the same race through some remote
ancestor; the Mosenthals, Abrahams, Phillipps, and other notabilities of the
Rand and Kimberley, were Jews, and one among the so-called Reformers,
associated with the Jameson Raid, was an American engineer, John Hays
Hammond.
The war, which was supposed to win the franchise for
Englishmen in the Transvaal, was in reality fought for the advantage of
foreigners. Most people honestly believed that President Kruger was aiming
at destroying English prestige throughout the vast dark continent, and would
have been horrified had they known what was going on in that distant land.
Fortunes were made on the Rand in a few days, but very few Englishmen were
among the number of those who contrived to acquire millions. Englishmen,
indeed, were not congenial to the Transvaal, whilst foreigners, claiming to
be Englishmen because they murdered the English language, abounded and
prospered, and in time came sincerely to believe that they were British
subjects, owing to the fact that they continually kept repeating that
Britain ought to possess the Rand.
When Britain came really to rule the Rand the
adventurers found it did not in the least secure the advantages which they
had imagined would derive from a war they fostered. This question of the
Uitlanders was as embarrassing for the English Government as it had been for
that of the Transvaal. These adventurers, who composed the mass of the
motley population which flourished on the Rand, would prove a source of
annoyance to any State in the world. On the other hand, the importance
acquired by the so-called financial magnates was daily becoming a public
danger, inasmuch as it tended to substitute the reign of a particular class
of individuals for the ruling of those responsible for the welfare of the
country. These persons individually believed that they each understood
better than the Government the conditions prevailing in South Africa, and
perpetually accused Downing Street of not realising and never protecting
British interests there.
Amidst their recriminations and the publicity they
could command from the Press, it is no wonder that Sir Alfred Milner felt
bewildered. It is to his everlasting honour that he did not allow himself to
be overpowered. He was polite to everybody; listened carefully to all the
many wonderful tales that were being related to him, and, without
compromising himself, proceeded to a work of quiet mental elimination that
very soon made him thoroughly grasp the intricacies of any situation. He
quickly came to the conclusion that President Kruger was not the principal
obstacle to a peaceful development of British Imperialism in South Africa.
If ever a conflict was foisted on two countries for mercenary motives it was
the Transvaal War, and a shrewd and impartial mind like Milner's did not
take long to discover that such was the case.
He was not, however, a man capable of lending himself
meekly to schemes of greed, however wilily they were cloaked. His was not
the kind of nature that for the sake of peace submits to things of which it
does not approve. This man, who was represented as an oppressor of the
Dutch, was in reality their best friend, and perhaps the one who believed
the most in their eventual loyalty to the English Crown. It is a thousand
pities that when the famous Bloemfontein Conference took place Sir Alfred
Milner, as he still was at that time, had not yet acquired the experience
which later became his concerning the true state of things in the Transvaal.
Had he at that time possessed the knowledge which he was later to gain, when
the beginning of hostilities obliged so many of the ruling spirits of
Johannesburg to migrate to the Cape, it is likely that he would have acted
differently. It was not easy for the High Commissioner to shake off the
influence of all that he heard, whether told with a good or bad intention,
and it was still harder for him in those first days of his office to discern
who was right or who was wrong among those who crowded their advice upon
him—and never forgave him when he did not follow their ill-balanced
counsels.
Concerning the outstanding personality of Cecil Rhodes,
the position of Sir Alfred Milner was even more difficult and entangled than
in regard to anyone else. It is useless to deny that he had arrived at Cape
Town with considerable prejudice against Rhodes. He could not but look
interrogatively upon the political career of a man who at the very time he
occupied the position of Prime Minister had lent himself to a conspiracy
against the independence of another land. Moreover, Rhodes was supposed,
perhaps not without reason, to be continually intriguing to return to power,
and to be chafing in secret at the political inaction which had been imposed
upon him, and for which he was himself responsible more than anyone else.
The fact that after the Raid Rhodes had been abandoned by his former friends
harmed him considerably as a political man by destroying his renown as a
statesman to whom the destinies of an Empire might be entrusted with safety.
One can truly say, when writing the story of those years, that it resolved
itself, into the vain struggle of Rhodes to recover his lost prestige. Sir
Alfred was continually being made responsible for things of which he had not
only been innocent, but of which, also, he had disapproved most
emphatically. To mention only one—the famous concentration camps. A great
deal of fuss was made about them at the time, and it was generally believed
that they had been instituted at the instigation of the High Commissioner.
When consulted on the subject Sir Alfred Milner had, on the contrary, not at
all shared the opinion of those who had believed that they were a necessity,
although ultimately, for lack of earlier steps, they became so.
The Colony at that time found its effective government
vested in the hands of the military authorities, who not infrequently acted
upon opinions which were not based upon experience or upon any local
conditions. They believed, too, implicitly what they were told, and when
they heard people protest, with tears in their eyes, their devotion to the
British Crown, and lament over the leniency with which the Governor of Cape
Colony looked upon rebellion, they could not possibly think that they were
listening to a tissue of lies, told for a purpose, nor guess that they were
being made use of. Under such conditions the only wonder is the few mistakes
which were made. To come back to the Boers' concentration camps, Sir Alfred
Milner was not a sanguinary man by any means, and his character was far too
firm to use violence as a means of government. It is probable that, left
alone, he would have found some other means to secure strict obedience from
the refugees to orders which most never thought of resisting. Unfortunately
for everybody concerned, he could do nothing beyond expressing his opinion,
and the circumstance that, out of a feeling of duty, he made no
protestations against things of which he could not approve was exploited
against him, both by the Jingo English party and by the Dutch, all over
South Africa. At Groote Schuur especially, no secret was made by the friends
of Rhodes of their disgust at the state of things prevailing in
concentration camps, and it was adroitly brought to the knowledge of all the
partisans of the Boers that, had Rhodes been master of the situation, such
an outrage on individual liberty would never have taken place. Sir Alfred
Milner was subjected to unfair, ill-natured criticisms which were as cunning
as they were bitter. The concentration camps afford only one instance of the
secret antagonisms and injustices which Sir Alfred Milner had to bear and
combat. No wonder thoughts of his days in South Africa are still, to him, a
bitter memory!
