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'MILNER'S YOUNG MEN'
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the cries, but stuck to business, and, on the whole, disappointed nobody except our own 'pro-Boers,' those strange persons who talk so much about 'miscalculations,' but who had to learn from the peace that it is they who miscalculated the Dutch temper, just as they learnt from the war that it is they who miscalculated the English. On the other hand, the quarter where economic disappointment was bound to tell most was among the Administration's natural friends. Johannesburg split into parties. It was no longer possible to say that for the first time on record the Dutch were divided and the British united. The solid and soberer part, probably the larger, remembered the pit from which they had been digged, and who digged them. They recognised the stern overshadowing conditions, which must, in this case, check and school the natural precocity of British colonists in outgrowing Imperial leading-strings. Others, at one time the most vocal, became the pupils (or, as they claim, the teachers) of the Boer pastors and ex-Generals; and many were those who vented their disappointment, if not on Milner personally, freely and loudly on 'Milner's young men.' For the public service, Milner was accused of a leaning to young, well-educated Englishmen, raw to their work and to the country. His 'Balliol kindergarten,' as a wag called it, insured a sharp break with old, bad traditions, and it produced some brilliant successes; but no doubt the rawness had its own drawbacks. Post-haste appointments, in any case, had to yield some percentage of failures; but the few conspicuous ones, oddly enough, were not among the 'high-salaried novices' of the outcry (whose services, if retrenched, were apt to be promptly snapped up at salaries as high or higher by business houses), but among tried men who, in the war, had emerged as conspicuous administrative successes. So exacting were the changed conditions, I am enough of a democrat to find a certain satisfaction in believing that capable autocracy has its points of weakness to set off those of admitted strength in the