them the love was hate, at least for reverence we need read nothing meaner than respect, and the foe who has mastered respect is halfway to a friend.
We have examined Milner's handling of the Dutch, as we did Rhodes's. Now for that other touchstone—the charge of being a man in a hurry. Granted that the Dutch were not to be won over, might they not have been left to time?
Against Milner this charge of hurry and lack of humane scruple can easily be brought home if you can prove one thing, to be defined presently. It is not enough to show that he led his country open-eyed into the war. That, which is said of various men according to the needs of the attack, is true of him—at least as true as of Mr. Chamberlain; for the dispatches hint one moment of tension when the Colonial Secretary (or the Cabinet) wavered and the High Commissioner stood firm—none, I think, when the rock was at Downing Street and the reed at Cape Town. The mischief once diagnosed, Milner never shrank from the surgery. He was not of those who said that Kruger would never fight, nor yet of those (if such there were) who promised a promenade to Pretoria. But when a tooth must out, and by the old way, the surgeon who refuses to promise painless dentistry does so not because he is inhumane, but because he is honest. When it came to peacemaking, the Boer bargainers had stiffer work with Milner than with Kitchener, and their friends here were ready with the reason. The warrior, generous and humane, was contrasted with the 'frigid satrap.' Those who embarrassed the hardest-headed of our soldiers with these gushing diplomas had execrated him as a barbarian a few years before for the posthumous decapitation of the Mahdi. Milner also, by an odd coincidence, once had to do with a decapitation of a dead rebel chief. It was shortly after he became Governor at the Cape. The act was that of a popular Volunteer officer, and Milner insisted on Ministers cashiering him for it. I cite the forgotten incident, of course, purely ad
