valid unless and until the call came to choose between it and loyalty to Paul Kruger? If so, the Queen's representative could not count on it for any help in the hard task before him of securing justice while keeping peace. If otherwise, now was the time to show it He invited them to throw over that old tradition—'The Republics, right or wrong!' and substitute for it the principle, 'Rights for the British in the Republic like those which Dutchmen enjoy in the Colonies. He granted fully the claim of kinship, but he asserted that of allegiance, and called upon the Dutch colonists by timely mediation to reconcile and fulfil both. Such in essence was the famous 'Graaff Reinet speech' of 1898. A Cape Governor, in the heart of a Dutch district, suggested the point of view, seemingly a novel one, that they should think of England not as a debtor for their loyalty, but as a generous creditor for their freedom. What a stir it made! What a tale of a tradition of mealy-mouthed officialism is told by the mere fact of that stir! It stands as a historic appeal, that fell, alas! mainly on deaf ears.
Not altogether so, however. People may talk now as if Milner had never tried to influence the Dutch, or, trying, had wholly failed to gain their confidence. But that will not do, since a chance of war has broken into the post-bags of Dutch leaders, and a Blue-Book shown the world the terms in which they wrote from Colony to Republic at the time of the Bloemfontein Conference. We thus have it beyond dispute that before Milner went to meet President Kruger he had convinced the Cape Dutch leaders, who had come into personal contact with him, that he was honest, that he preferred peace, that he was not prepared to pay all prices for peace, and, lastly, that, unlike Sir Bartle Frere, he had the British Government and people behind him. And of these things they advised Presidents Steyn and Kruger, who went their own appointed way. If Milner failed with the Dutch, in this, at least, he succeeded beyond any predecessor: he opened the lips of the Dutch leaders
