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war had practically suspended, should be suspended formally until the completion of the after-war settlement. The advice was overruled, and to-day we can all, wise after the event, prove the advice a mistake. Some mistakes there must be marked up against a man shouldering Milner's responsibilities in such a whirlpool of problems as the South Africa of the last eight years; but let us examine this one in the light of the facts, not as they present themselves now, but as they presented themselves then. There were two or three measures indispensable from the Imperial point of view to make the after-war situation in Cape Colony a tolerable one. No one will deny that Equally, no one will assert that those measures could ever have passed the then existing Cape Parliament if the majority of Dutch members had stood to their own expressed views and sympathies. If Milner despaired of the Dutch majority, he had seen its chosen head, Mr. Schreiner, after efforts which Milner alone could estimate, despair of the Ministry which that majority had created. And no wonder! What sort of Treason Court could men be expected to set up to disfranchise their own constituents—in some cases to try themselves? To judge by their speeches, what called for a penal Bill was the martial acts of loyalists; what called for indemnity was the martial acts of rebels. In the end, happily, under sobering influences, of which the half-unsheathed blade of Suspension was not the least, they did, under protest, legislate the Imperial minimum. By a series of Parliamentary 'flukes' the Bills passed. And since then there has followed, by the greatest fluke of all, something not indeed indispensable to the situation, but carrying it at last out of the region of flukes into one rather less breathless: I mean the success of the Progressive or Imperialist party at the Cape General Election. In calling the success of my political friends a fluke, I mean no injustice to the work and organization which won the success, nor to the fine temper and modesty and manliness which have gone to make up that happy