prolong it. 'Obviously,' in Milner's own words,[1] 'the interest of the Mother Country must be to grant self-government as quickly and completely as possible'; but even the most impatient agree that to this there are in common-sense and prudence a few conditions precedent, of which the first concerns the strength of that pacific army of occupation, the British population on the goldfields. In Milner's ears the thunder of the mine batteries spoke more for the future than the thunder of the guns. The harsh but wholesome din of 'stamps,' not the clack of tongues, was the right music for this intermezzo, and business, not politics, the right motif. Thus the mines became the first of British interests, and the industrial—or, if you will, the 'capitalist'—policy, became the broad Imperial policy.
In a labyrinth of questions there is generally one in which the practical statesman detects the clue to all the rest. At Bloemfontein it was Franchise. Here it was Labour. By whatever path the problems of the hour were approached—revenue, war contribution, public works, commercial and agricultural distress, the unemployed question, the British immigration question, the Responsible Government question—Milner found ever the same impasse and the one exit. With a great mining expansion, all was possible; without it, nothing. The Labour Commission made it clear that the one key to such expansion was some reinforcement of the African supply of unskilled labour. Unskilled, therefore (in a colour country) coloured; extra-African, therefore Asiatic; Asiatic, therefore (by universal consent) stringently restricted in the interest of the skilled white workman—such was the logic of hard facts. Granting the facts correct (and Milner is not an inquirer easily duped), what escape was there from Milner's conclusion? Granting the case for prompt relief, add that no other form of relief equally prompt was even suggested, and the strongest objection to the Chinese Ordinance is confessed, not absolute, but rela-
- ↑ Speech at Johannesburg, March 31, 1905.
