Page:The empire and the century.djvu/556

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A QUESTION FOR THE CRITICS
518

at all, they had to be dragged mto line for reform, are not surprised that they grudge its price. The mingled exactions and concessions of Kruger's days were really more in their atmosphere than the direct taxation of Milner's. But we can all see that this spirit of 'hang-the-franchise' and 'make-your-pile-and-quit' is the selfsame spirit in Mr. Burt's workman and in these cosmopolitan capitalists. Why, if in them it is the essence of all that is ignoble and unpatriotic, does it become in a British-born artisan something to be quoted with respect by a British democratic leader? Against them both set such a typical 'Randlord' as the one I instanced. Nothing of the cosmopolite about him! A South-African-born colonist, full of old Barberton and Bush-veld memories, who risked his neck for politics in the reform days and is heart and soul in the future of the country. Most of the same claims can be made for others as typical, like Sir George Farrar and Mr. Abe Bailey. How many Rand working men have served so long a civic apprenticeship to the Transvaal?

To conclude this part of the subject, I will only add that those who fancy Milner's a likely temperament for 'a capitalist tool' should study the quiet firmness with which he crushed the incipient agitation against his enforcement of the 10 per cent. profit tax. That incident makes its own comment upon the parrot-cry. The same cry was screamed at the Jameson Ministry at the Cape. They answered it with such a graduated income tax as Liberalism in England cannot yet boast of. I ask my English Liberal friends, who call my Cape Progressive friends 'the capitalist party,' when they will be able to show the like. Graduated death duties are their top mark in democratic finance so far; and it is worth recalling that that instrument was shaped for them, as Sir William Harcourt handsomely testified, by the hand and brain of Milner.

The thread of our story can now run to a finish, disencumbered of controversy.

After his labours at Vereeniging for a secure peace,