No Assouan Barrages for him! In the south of Africa as in the north he has had to prepare surpluses for those who follow, not to enjoy them himself. The economic world-currents that govern depression and recovery are leisurely and incalculable. It is a tide that takes its own time to ebb and flow. Sensitive to ill it may be: a war, a broil, a rumour can retard it; but hasten it will not, for any man, neither to enable an overworked High Commissioner to see the fruit of his hands and bring his sheaves with him, nor to relieve an English-speaking community, good at work but less good at waiting, which has had to bear, sometimes with little to sustain it beyond his example, so long a strain on its loyalty. Through weary years the traders and workers of South Africa have been watching for the turn of that tide, and only heard
'Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar
… down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
'Fancy quoting Matthew Arnold to describe a slump!' sneers somebody. Pray, sir, were you ever a young colonist trying to build up a home in a new country? The tide is turning at last, but too late for many smaller men, and too late for Milner. The undertow has tired him out.
In irrigation, in forestry, in communications, above all, in land colonization, his full plans would have changed the face of the country. Some of them, perhaps, may never be realized now; the day of opulence will come, but not the day of opulent dictatorship; they will remain like those massive stone zimbabwes out in the African veld, which time and nature cannot obliterate, but on which posterity will never build. But much is well begun, and abides the coming of the better years for triumphant completion. In education of every grade; in local government; in the administrative frame and scaffolding; in all his essays towards a broad working compromise upon those questions of colour
