enthusiasm,' in Lord Rosebery's words, 'was all for peace, retrenchment, and reform. … He had the consciousness of a boundless capacity for meeting the real requirements of the country '; but he was reserved for a sterner task, glorious indeed, but one that involved 'wrecking his whole financial edifice … postponing and repressing all his projected reforms.'
To Milner's own mind his South African career should have had two chapters. The first we have traced. To secure that the coming union should be within, not without the British Empire, and to inspire and weld into one convinced, high-tempered whole the British in South Africa, in Great Britain, and throughout the Empire, till that issue was decided—this chapter Milner completed; and any man might be content to live by it. But Milner aspired to a second chapter, beside which, could it have been fully written, the former should have seemed, as it will some day seem in the history of the country, a mere prologue, a destructive though necessary interlude. To complete the fabric of union, to celebrate what might be called the Dutch-English house-warming, and leave the South African people installed in the charge and governance of its own future—this is denied him. Like Rhodes, he has had to leave for other hands the setting of the coping-stone upon that fabric—nay, he does not claim to have earned it above the foundations; and, hater of glozing as he is, he makes no secret of his feeling that to this part of his task his countrymen have yet to do full justice. They will be readier to do it, no doubt, when the economic revival already traceable as the belated reward of his last efforts goes pulsing full through all the arteries of South African lire. He had every temptation to hold on till then, if it had been physically possible. But it was not to be. The opportunity of a lifetime, Milner's opportunity as an Ædile on the grand scale, has ebbed away. For that, statesmanship needs to be able to bring to yoke Pharaoh's fat kine, the years of plenty; and all that Milner has had to inspan has been the lean, the lean, and again the lean.
