material or moral successes that give him a place in history; that win for
him the love, the respect, and sometimes the hatred, of his
contemporaries. Sir Alfred Milner would have known how to make the work of
Cecil Rhodes of permanent value to the British Empire. It was a thousand
pities that when Sir Alfred Milner took office in South Africa the
influence of Cecil Rhodes, at one time politically dominant, had so
materially shrunk as a definitive political factor.

Sir Alfred Milner found himself in the presence of a position already
compromised beyond redemption, and obliged to fight against evils which
ought never to have been allowed to develop. Even at that time, however,
it would have been possible for Sir Alfred Milner to find a way of
disposing of the various difficulties connected with English rule in South
Africa had he been properly seconded by Mr. Rhodes. Unfortunately for both
of them, their antagonism to each other, in their conception of what ought
or ought not to be done in political matters, was further aggravated by
intrigues which tended to keep Rhodes apart from the Queen's High
Commissioner in South Africa.

It would not at all have suited certain people had Sir Alfred contrived to
acquire a definite influence over Mr. Rhodes, and assuredly this would
have happened had the two men have been allowed unhindered to appreciate
the mental standard of each other. Mr. Rhodes was at heart a sincere
patriot, and it was sufficient to make an appeal to his feelings of
attachment to his Mother Country to cause him to look at things from that
point of view. Had there existed any real intimacy between Groote Schuur
and Government House at Cape Town, the whole course of South African
politics might have been very different.

Sir Alfred Milner arrived in Cape Town with a singularly free and unbiased