hominem for the detractor. Lord Kitchener's action either at Khartoum or at Vereeniging is not under discussion. But there was enough to suggest, what experience since the peace has amply proved, that it was the longer view, not the harder heart, that made Milner stand like steel for terms that would not compromise the future, when Kitchener, utterly 'fed up' (in army slang), was thinking rather how to get the weary thing done with, and on to the next labour of Hercules in India.
A Bishop in the House of Lords—one recalls Lord Goschen's generous resentment—charged Milner personally with apathy about the sickness in the concentration camps. When the War Office Commission of ladies looked into the facts on the spot, they soon found that, personally as officially, the Lead of all the devoted workers who spent themselves in setting right the camps was throughout Milner. It is visible enough in their report (Cd. 898, 1902). Reparation for witness borne unjustly could not, to an eminent Christian gentleman, be anything but a gracious pleasure. So far, I believe, the Bishop has denied himself the luxury. Self-denial is also a Christian grace: hardly, in this case, the more winning one.
No, neither hurry nor inhumanity is proved by Milner's policy having led open-eyed to war. For that you must prove something different and definite—viz., that the object of the policy could have been attained in peace. This, of course, plenty of our glib censors are ready to assert. The Transvaal situation was bad, they grant you—so bad, indeed, that it could never have lasted; and, in fact (the evidence for this next is never vouchsafed), it was coming to an end of itself. All that was needed was to leave Boer and Outlander to stew in their own juice (well, in the Outlander's juice, at any rate), and somehow, some day, freedom would have slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent. That is how Englishmen got popular rights from Englishmen, and so, by a historical law, they would ultimately
