Lord Milner was entertained at a farewell banquet in Johannesburg
on Friday week, and delivered an important speech on the future of South Africa. While he expressed marked hopefulness as to the inevitable approach of a fresh period of expansion and development, he warned his hearers not to expect too much of self-government. Personally he believed that popular elections and the party system would not improve the administration or finances any more than, if as much as, the influences already at work. He appealed to the Colony to accept the new Constitution heartily, and to work it with a good will, and he could not believe that the Boers as a body would put themselves in the wrong by refusing to co-operate with their British fellow-subjects. But if they refused to play the game, let them sit out. He deprecated over-fussiness in our attitude towards the Boers. "Our policy should be one of courtesy and con- sideration for their feelings always ; of compromise on questions of principle, and of suppression of our own natural and legitimate sentiments, never." To " kow-tow " to them was not only undignified, it was the worst possible way to impress or win over a strong, shrewd, eminently self- respecting people. Lord Milner defended his fiscal policy-- in regard to the railway rates and in insisting on tho. Government's share of the country's mineral wealth—and the land settlement, in which he bad not adopted the view of ousting the old country population, but rather aimed at quickening it with new leaven, and so forming a link between town and country, British an Dutch.
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