in Cape Colony, To open the ears of the Dutch leaders in the Republics was beyond him; and beyond any man was it (since not even to gods is it given to undo the East) to make that secret and temporizing voice, wrung from Cape Dutch politicians, penetrate to the dumb masses of their countrymen—the men on whose consensus really hung the issue of peace or war, and who had to decide it without ever having heard the truth—except from Milner.
Rhodes used to be blamed for courting the Dutch. Milner was blamed for not courting them. The candid will admit that as Governor at the Cape he held the constitutional balance even, and that in his more autocratic office in the Transvaal he did not let the natural sulks of the Dutch leaders or the loud nearness of Johannesburg affect a readiness, an eagerness even, to do what little the bad times allowed for the Dutch rural interest. Road and railway plans showed him more than once as Member for the Veld rather than as Member for the Mines. The candid will admit this; but even the candid may add that in matters not so easy to schedule there has been a change from what recent predecessors had made the regulation manner towards the Dutch. A popular conciliatoriness that only just missed the apologetic had become a fashion, almost (what diplomatic ententes cordiales so easily do become) a pose.
In the main they were right, these predecessors. It is a question of occasion and of atmosphere. There are times (as in South Africa in the eighties) when a prodigal son returning from estrangement is rightly greeted with some effusiveness, even though the brother who never strayed be moved to priggish complaints that 'loyalty does not pay.' There is a time, again (as in South Africa in the nineties), when anything like fussy conciliation is 'the worst way in the world,' in Milner's own apt words, 'to impress or to win over a strong, a shrewd, and an eminently self-respecting people.' At such a time the Dutch prodigal who purports to have
