tative of the Crown was less obvious, and should be proportionately more fruitful—Milner went on to emphasize, as a matter of his personal opinion, the inevitable corollary of naval partnership—viz., the creation of some organ of consultation upon world-issues for the sea-united Commonwealth.
That scandalized some home critics. It was not in the Handbook of Official Perorations. But, thus and in other ways did Rhodes and Milner both number themselves of that great unformed party which is neither the ins nor the outs, which touches here the foreign politics of the one, here the home politics of the other; a party to which Imperialism and Carlyle's Condition of the People Question are one and the same business of fitly rearing, housing, distributing, co-ordinating, and training for war and peace the people of this commonwealth; a party which seems to have no name, no official leader, no paper even, but which I believe, when it comes by a soul and a voice, will prove to include a majority of the British in Britain and a still greater majority of the British overseas. Thus, at any rate—for here the digression stops—did Rhodes and Milner relate the South African Union to the Imperial idea; and now to our business in South Africa.
The table-talk citations set out above make a good starting-point. Sharply distinct by training, by temperament, and by the material in which they worked, both men were alike in a quick mutual recognition that left no room for jealousy. On Rhodes's part that really needed some largeness, for the edges of his political breakage were yet raw when Milner succeeded at the Cape: officially, Milner once or twice had to thwart him; unofficially, Milner superseded him also in the character of the strong man to whom English eyes were turned—the man who should reverse that strange persistent trend of things which for twenty years, while materially British brains and British capital and hard work were making the country, had caused Britishers to
