Lord Milner, who is paying his first visit to Natal,
has made two impressive speeches during the week at Pietermaritzburg and Durban. In the first, after paying a generous tribute to the disinterested patriotism and self-sacrifice of Natal, he laid special stress on the need of patience. "What I want," he went on, "is notorious now. I want a peaceful, prosperous, progressive South Africa; one great community under the British flag." But they must not count on its coming in a hurry ; the great thing was to feel that every step was in the right direction, and to that end he had come to Natal,—not ta make speeches or expose his own views, but to make acquaintance with the Colonists' minds, and learn something that might throw fresh light on the difficult path he had to tread. At Durban Lord Milner observed that though the war in a formal sense might "never be over, still it was burning itself out, and the recurring spurts of flame, though apparently fierce and alarming, came to nothing, because there Was nothing left for them to feed on. Consequently he held it to be a great mistake to allow these circumstances to prevent a gradual resumption of normal life, and a gradual restoration of the conquered territories not only industrially, but even to some extent agriculturally. "We ought," he said, "to show ourselves masters of the house we have taken by rebuilding it and beginning to live in it."
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