The abuse showered by certain newspapers upon the High Commissioner not only strengthened his hands and his authority, but transformed what ought to have remained a personal question into one in which the dignity as well as the prestige of the Empire was involved.

To have recalled him after he had been subjected to such treatment would have been equivalent to a confession that the State was in the wrong.

I have never been able to understand how men of such undoubted perception as Mr.Sauer or Mr.Merriman, or other leaders of the Bond, did not grasp this fact.

Sir Alfred himself put the aspect very cleverly before the public in an able and dignified speech which he made at the lunch offered to Lord Roberts by the Mayor and Corporation of Cape Town when he said, "To vilify her representative is a strange way to show one's loyalty to the Queen." A feature in Sir Alfred Milner's character, which was little known outside the extremely small circle of his personal friends, was that when he was in the wrong he never hesitated to acknowledge the fact with straightforward frankness.

His judgments were sometimes hasty, but he was always willing to amend an opinion on just grounds.