the home of patience—he was deaf even when it was swollen by some who in less searching times had been loud in eulogy. How popular, and for a departing dictator how easy, to make a premature concession to the Responsible Government party! He was stone to the temptation—he would not even, as I think he might well have done, withdraw before he left that armoury of special powers against sedition, which he had long been able to leave rusting. No; all the more tempting fruit he would leave ripening for his successor. Lord Selborne's task, so well begun, will be perhaps the easier for it. And, in the end, Milner had his reward. When the time came to leave, the community he had served took thought and suddenly found its voice. There was one of those great lifting waves of deeper feeling in which the cavils and dissensions of the hour are drowned, and Milner laid down his office heartened by such a demonstration as neither he nor South Africa is likely to forget. His countrymen in that part of the Empire have ranked him among the great proconsuls. I believe that time and a wider tribunal will confirm their verdict.
In Milner's farewell speeches—strangely impressive to those who heard them, and in their pregnant plainness the best commentary offered yet by mend or foe upon his work in the Transvaal[1]—there was one note of personal regret, one sigh of disappointment. Men, he said, would probably choose to remember him in connection with the war, and he would rather they connected him with the tremendous effort made to build up a national fabric after the peace. The passage is suggestive. One recalls how it was the real ambition of William Pitt the younger to reform his country's finance, though a hard fate compelled him instead to be the figurehead of an exhausting national struggle and the theme of Coleridge's ghastly lampoon, 'Fire, Famine, and Slaughter.' 'His
- ↑ The three speeches are issued in a sixpenny reprint by the Imperial South African Association, 66, Victoria Street, Westminster.
