Lord Rosmead retired early in 1897. It is said that three men so different in character as Lord Salisbury, Mr. Chamberlain, and Mr. Stead, each separately fixed upon the same name as being that of the man most capable of undertaking the position of High Commissioner in South Africa—a position always difficult, but now more than ever arduous and responsible. To nine out of every ten men with whom he had been brought into contact there was little in Sir Alfred Milner—as he then was—to distinguish him from other high-principled, capable, and pleasant-mannered heads of departments in the Civil Service. His métier was finance, and his accomplishment literature. Commencing with journalism and an unsuccessful contest (in the Liberal interest) for the Harrow division of Middlesex, he had been private secretary to Lord Goschen, Under-Secretary for Finance in Egypt, and Head of the Inland Revenue. In this latter office he had given invaluable assistance to Sir William Harcourt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in respect of what is perhaps the most successful of recent methods of raising revenue—the death duties. The principle of the graduated death duties was Harcourt's; but it was Milner who worked out the elaborate system which rendered his ideas coherent, and enabled them eventually to be put into effect. Academic distinctions, however ample, cannot be said to-day to afford a definite assurance of pre-eminent capacity for the service of the State. Yet it was certainly no disadvantage to Sir Alfred Milner to have been a scholar of Balliol, or a President of the Oxford Union.[26] Whatever direct knowledge the educated public had of him was based probably upon the impression created by his book England in Egypt. This was a work which indicated that its author had formed high ideals of English statesmanship, and that his experience of a complex administrative system, working in a political society full of intrigue and international jealousy, had developed in him the rare qualities of insight and humour. Some of his readers might have reflected that an active association with so accomplished a master of financial and administrative method as Lord Cromer was in itself a useful equipment for a colonial administrator.
But the British public, both in England and South Africa, took their view of the appointment from the opinions expressed by the many prominent men to whom Sir Alfred Milner was personally known. The leaders and the Press of both parties were unstinted in approval of the choice which Mr. Chamberlain had made. The banquet given to Sir Alfred Milner three weeks before his departure to the Cape (March 28th, 1897) provided an occasion for an expression of unrestrained admiration and confidence unique in the annals of English public life. "He has the union of intellect with fascination that makes men mount high," wrote Lord Rosebery. And Sir William Harcourt, "the most grateful and obliged" of Milner's "many friends and admirers," pronounced him to be "a man deserving of all praise and all affection." Mr. Asquith, who presided, stated in a speech marked throughout by a note of intimate friendliness that "no appointment of our time has been received with a larger measure both of the approbation of experienced men and of the applause of the public." The office itself was "at the present moment the most arduous and responsible in the administrative service of the country." Not only "embarrassing problems," but "formidable personalities" would confront the new High Commissioner for South Africa:
"But," he added, "we know that he takes with him as clear an intellect and as sympathetic an imagination, and, if need should arise, a power of resolution as tenacious and as inflexible as belongs to any man of our acquaintance."
Milner's reply is significant of the spirit in which he had undertaken his task. Like Rhodes, he had found in his Oxford studies the reasoned basis for an enlightened Imperialism. Chief among his earliest political convictions was the belief that—
"there was no political object comparable in importance with that of preventing a repetition of such a disaster [as the loss of the United States]: the severance of another link in the great Imperial chain.... It is a great privilege to be allowed to fill any position in the character of what I may be, perhaps, allowed to call a 'civilian soldier of the Empire.' To succeed in it, to render any substantial service to any part of our world-wide State, would be all that in any of my most audacious dreams I had ever ventured to aspire to. But in a cause in which one absolutely believes, even failure—personal failure, I mean, for the cause itself is not going to fail—would be preferable to an easy life of comfortable prosperity in another sphere."
Personal traits.
This was the man who was sent to maintain the interests of the paramount Power in a South Africa shaken by racial antagonism, and already feverish with political intrigue and commercial rivalry. Of all the tributes of the farewell banquet, Sir William Harcourt's was closest to the life—"worthy of all praise and all affection." The quality of inspiring affection to which this impressive phrase bore witness was one which had made itself felt among the humblest of those who were fortunate enough to have been associated with Lord Milner in any public work. Long after Milner had left Egypt, the face of the Syrian or Coptic Effendi of the Finance Department in Cairo would light up at the chance mention of the genial Englishman who had once been his chief. And in remote English counties revenue officials still hang his portrait upon the walls of their lodgings. Such men had no claim to appraise his professional merit or his gifts of intellect; but their feelings were responsive to the charm of his nature. "He was so considerate": that was their excuse for retaining his name and personality among the pleasant memories of the past. But the other side of Milner's character, the power of "tenacious and inflexible resolution," of which Mr. Asquith spoke, was destined to be brought into play so prominently during the "eight dusky years" of his South African administration, that to the distant on-looker it came to be accepted as the characterising quality of the man. To some Milner became the "man of blood and iron"; determined, like Bismarck, to secure the unity of a country by trampling with iron-shod boots upon the liberties of its people: even as in the view of others his clear mental vision—never more clear than in South Africa—became clouded by an adopted partisanship, and he was a "lost mind." Nothing could be further from the truth. If the man lived who could have turned the Boer and Afrikander from hatred and distrust of England and English ideas by personal charm and honourable dealing, it was the man who had universally inspired all his former associates, whether equals or subordinates, with admiration and affection. Whatever bitterness was displayed against Lord Milner personally by the Boer and Afrikander leaders after the issue of the war was decided was due to their perception that he was then—as always—a source of strength and an inspiration for renewed effort to those whom they regarded as their rivals or opponents. They hated him just as the French hated Bismarck—because he was the strong man on the other side.
Lord Milner's inflexibility was, in its essence, a keener perception of duty than the ordinary: it was a determination to do what he believed to be for the good of South Africa and the Empire, irrespective of any consideration of personal or party relationship. It was in no sense the incapacity to measure the strength of an opponent, still less did it arise from any failure to perceive the cogency of an opinion in conflict with his own. Before the eight years of his administration had passed, Lord Milner's knowledge of the needs of South Africa and the Empire had become so profound that it carried him ahead of the most enlightened and patriotic of the home statesmen who supported him loyally to the end. Through the period of the war, when the issues were simple and primitive, they were wholly with him. But afterwards they supported him not so much because they understood the methods which he employed and the objects at which he aimed, as because they were by this time convinced of his complete mastery of the political and economic problems of South Africa. It is to this inability to understand the facts of the South African situation, as he had learnt them, that we must attribute the comparative feebleness shown by the Unionist leaders in resisting the perverse attempt which was made by the Liberal party, after the General Election of 1906, to revoke the final arrangements of his administration. The interval that separated Lord Milner's knowledge of South Africa from that of the Liberal ministers was profound; but even the Unionist chiefs showed but slight appreciation of the unassailable validity of the administrative decisions with which they had identified themselves, when the "swing of the pendulum" brought these decisions again, and somewhat unexpectedly, before the great tribunal of the nation.
Arrival at Cape Town.
Lord Milner sailed for the Cape on April 17th, 1897. At the actual moment of his arrival the relations between the Home Government and the South African Republic were strained almost to the breaking point. In a peremptory despatch of March 6th, Mr. Chamberlain had demanded the repeal of the Aliens Immigration and Aliens Expulsion Laws of 1896—the former of which constituted a flagrant violation of the freedom of entry secured to British subjects by Article XIV. of the London Convention. This virtual ultimatum was emphasised by the appearance of a British squadron at Delagoa Bay, and by the despatch of reinforcements to the South African garrisons. The evident determination of the Imperial Government induced the Volksraad to repeal the Immigration Law and to pass a resolution in favour of amending the Expulsion Law. The crisis was over in June, and during the next few months the Pretoria Executive showed a somewhat more conciliatory temper towards the Government of Great Britain. And in this connection two other facts must be recorded. In August, 1896, Sir Jacobus de Wet had been succeeded as British Agent at Pretoria by Sir William (then Mr.) Conyngham Greene, and the Imperial Government was assured, by this appointment, of the services of an able man and a trained diplomatist. The Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the Raid, promised in July, 1896, met on February 16th, 1897, and reported on July 13th of the same year. Its report did little more than reassert the findings of the Cape Parliamentary Inquiry, which had been before the British public for the last year. It was otherwise remarkable for the handle which it gave (by the failure to insist upon the production of certain telegrams) to some extreme Radicals to assert Mr. Chamberlain's "complicity" in the "invasion" of the Transvaal as originally planned by Mr. Rhodes.