INTRODUCTION

A WORD of introduction is due from me with regard to the scope of this work and its relation to the title it bears. When this volume was first announced to the public the provisional title I adopted was 'Lord Milner and His Work.' Though there has been no departure from the original plan which I designed, it has seemed better for several reasons to modify the description. In the first place, I found that there was a widespread expectation amongst Lord Milner's friends and my own that I proposed to write a biography of the High Commissioner. A remonstrance soon reached me from a very distinguished friend of Lord Milner's with whom I have the honour of some slight acquaintance, in which the writer expressed his astonishment that I, 'with my oldfashioned Tory principles,' should contemplate such a latterday vulgarity as that of writing the biography of a man still living whose work was still unaccomplished, or, even worse, that I should meditate the grosser offence of pen-and-inking a laboured appreciation or character-sketch of a friend. I was able to reassure my correspondent by the sincere avowal that he could not detest more than myself the new-fangled fashion of contemporary eulogy or censure. In this connection I may be allowed to say that there will be found in these pages no panegyric of my own which exceeds the limits of approbation one man may express to another in his presence without shuddering himself or causing his unhappy victim to shudder; nor has the object of my labours been

to vindicate Lord Milner against the many truculent and, in most cases, unwarrantable attacks to which the rancour of partisanship has exposed him. In a sense, of course, any record of the prosecution of a policy with which the writer thoroughly agrees is a vindication of that policy, but in no other sense have I sought to frame an apology for Lord Milner. The second consideration which caused me to abandon the original title was the unexpected prolongation of the war in South Africa. I must honestly confess that, though I was never amongst the optimists-a class from which Lord Milner himself must be excluded-I did anticipate at the beginning of 1901, when I took this work in hand, that the storm which has desolated South Africa would have passed away before the close of the year. It had been my intention to devote the latter part of my book to an exposition of the schemes of reconstruction which Lord Milner would have to undertake as soon as the sword was exchanged for the sceptre. To the gods, however, it has seemed otherwise. The storm, as Lord Milner recently said, is behind us, and not in front of us, but the ground is not yet in a condition even for the function of laying the foundation stone of the new fabric which is to be raised on the ruins of the old. It would, therefore, have been worse than idle for me to attempt to sketch even in rude outline the plan of the new building as I believed it to be conceived in Lord Milner's mind. Such being the case, I have closed this volume with a record of events up to the despatch of the ultimatum by Messrs. Kruger and Steyn. The original title would therefore have been misleading, since it would have covered only a half-told story. Except upon grounds of patriotism and humanity, I cannot regret that circumstances have imposed limitations upon my original scheme. They have enabled me to expand more fully than otherwise would have been possible that part of my work which from the outset I have regarded as the more essential.

The idea of writing the book occurred to me during a six months' sojourn in South Africa as special commissioner for the Daily Telegraph. My commission was a purely political one, and in the course of the letters which I addressed to the Daily Telegraph the war itself was only incidentally mentioned. I allude to this fact principally to show that my whole attention was devoted to the political situation, influenced as it was, of course, by the existence of hostilities, but not to the course of the military campaign. I found, not altogether to my astonishment, that the British public was woefully ignorant of the history of our relations with South Africa. It swam, so to speak, into their sphere of vision with the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 and with the subsequent revolt, appeased rather than concluded, by the 'Peace of Majuba.' South Africa has hitherto been to the inhabitants of this island somewhat of the nature of a variable star. After its acquisition, it appeared for the best part of a century as a 'faint telescopic object,' studied mainly through the glasses of the missionary and the philanthropist. Between 1877 and 1881 it blazed forth as a star of the second or third magnitude, only to sink again into comparative invisibility, till the discovery of the gold mines of the Witwatersrand and the consequences attendant thereon raised it gradually in the scale, until in 1899 it figured in the political heavens as conspicuous and as ruddy as the planet Mars. Yet there had been nothing very abnormal in the development of events which culminated in the struggle for supremacy in South Africa between the Dutch and the British. The intermittent displays of exceptional brilliancy were but the temporary manifestations of a process which was really continuous. Ignorance of this indisputable fact has been the cause of all the misapprehensions, not perversely voluntary, which found expression in Great Britain. Lord Milner's work in South Africa could not be understood by those who had not probed a little below the surface. I found even amongst persons