LORD MILNER.

Waikato Times, Volume 88, Issue 13488, 19 May 1917, Page 3 (Supplement)

LORD MILNER.

(By F. Cnnliffe-Owen.)

Of the live members of the War Committee of the new British Cabinet, that is to say, of the inner circle of the administration, who form the species of dictatorato to which the British Empire looks for the successful conclusion of the present war, the only one who rivals Lord Curzon in masterly ability is Lord Milner. There i are many, indeed, wllo look upon him I as superior in capacity to the former Viceroy of India, and it is a wonderful to his cleverness that the English people, in spite of their intense prejudice against everybody and everything connected in any way with Germany, should have almost unanimously insisted on Lord Milner being included in the War Council despite his Teuton birth, early education, iuid relations. To Americans Milner is a figure of more than ordinary interest, and that for two reasons. The first is that he is an entirely self-made man who. without any advantages of lineage, wealth, or the influence of powerful relatives managed to. achieve fame as a great administrator and to win a seat in the House of Lords and the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, usually regarded as the crowning reward of civil services under the Crown, before he was 50. Had there been any defeat of the Liberals either in Parliament or at a general election prior to the war Milner would undoubtedly have been accorded iin important place in the Unionist Cabinet. But the Liberals pifanaged to rqhiain in undisturbed power until 1915, when they were forced, not by Parliamentary ' insistence, but by the overwhelming pressure of popular sentiment, to consent to a reconstruction of their ministry on coalition lines. The crusade against English citizens of German birth or parentage was then at its height, a crusade which drove a number of ardent sympathisers- with the ' cause of the Allies, born and breed in England but handicapped with German ancestry and names, out of public and even social life in the United' Kingdom and forced King George to deprive the, British navy of the services of one of its very best officers, his cousin, Prince Louis of Battenburg, to whose foresight as First Lord of the Admiralty, in the summer of 1914, Great Britain is indebted for the fact that the naval forces of the empire, were in a state of full mobilisation and entirely ready for war on that fateful August day when the Kaiser first hurled defiance" at the Powers of the Entente. In view of the bitterness and of the unreasoning nature of this crusade it was considered impossible at the time to request Lord Milner to take ihe; place in the Coalition Cabinet to which he was manifestly entitled by his services to the empire and to the Unionist party, and above all by his universally admitted ability. It was felt that the pubhc would not stand for his German birth and connection. So he was passed over and compelled to stand down until the moment quite recently when the necessities of the nation became so great and the crisis through which it was passing. so acute that the coalition Cabinet was forced to resign, and Lord Milner despite all the objections previously entertained against him was brought into' the very front rank' of the new administration by the unanimous wish of the people as a man whose services were indispensable to the empire in its hour of stress. Lord Milner has not been appointed . to the management of anv of the great departments of the State.' He has been named as a Minister without portfolio, in order to enable him to give the. benefit of his experience in the entire conduct of the Government and to ren- ' der it possible for him to devote himself principally to the direction of the war and to the, problems of policy immedi- ' . ately connected therewith. It was in this capacity that during ' the past fortnight he visited Rome in order to take part in the congress assembled: there by the Governments of the Entente Powers on the subject of the situation in the Balkans. On hia way back to England l he stayed over in Paris to consult with Premier Briand and at the headquarters of the French and British Generalissimos in order to confer with them. It is understood • that he has played an important role : in determining the Allies to adopt without/ any further delay a more energetic and definite policy with regard to the : situation in Greece. Lord Milner and Lord Curzon to- i ge.thcr constitute a wonderful team and that they should have both been included' in the inner circle of the Cabinet known as the War Council is calculated to inspire confidence. The only question is as to whether they will run well in harness together. They are both of them men of powerful personality, of strong character, and are both possessed of that sort of assurance which only come to those who have, as in their case, spent years in well nigh autocratic administration of great colonial dependencies. For if Lord Curzon had been Viceroy of India, Lord Milner has been GovernorGeneral and Lord High Commissioner of South Africa, and was at the helm there not only throughout the Boer war, but also in the times immediately preceding and following that conflict. Neither of the two men is particularly patient or tolerant. They are inclined to be somewhat imperious in their manner, and do not suffer gladly those fools and bores who, alas! are extensively representted' among our fellow creatures. They do not easily brook contradiction, are gifted with sharply pointed pens and equally incisive speech; and, while generally respected, cannot be said to be in any way popular. Indeed, if they aio now both set upon a pinnacle by their countrymen it is not because they are liked or have a large follojving of devoted ,and enthusiastic adherents, but solely because they are looked upon as indispensable to the situation. Unlike Lord Curzon, who after losing one beautiful and wealthy American wife has now won another. Lord Milner has remained unmarried. One can imagine Curzon in the role of a lover, and of an arient one at that, but not Lord Milner. The latter is so reserved, so imperturbable and in such entire command of his feelings and of his emotions —if he has any—that it is impossible to fancy him as submitting to the yoke of any woman, no matter how fascinating. Those who know him best look upon him as the most confirmed of bachelors, and regard his peerage a> destined to pass out of existence with his demise. So much that is erroneous has been printed concerning the German birth and connections of Lord Milner that | the best service one can render him is W to place the facts before the public as they really are. His grandfather was an Englishman of the name of James Richardson Milner, who established himself as a merchant at Dusseldorf on the Rhine a few years after the battle of Waterloo. He dropped the name of James and called himself Richard Milner, marrying at Dusseldorf, a German lady of dfc the name of Sophie von Rappard. There is a Dutch branch of her family, to which W. F. Van Rappard, the present Minister of the Netherlands at Washington, belongs. In 1825 Richard Milner and his wife I moved to Neuss. They had several sons. Of these one became a professor of the public school or "gymnasium" of Kreuznach. Another son took orders in the Lutheran Church and became ?astor of a small town in the Rhine 'rovince. A third son flourished in the Province of Posen. They nil married and had sons, some of their descendants, now serving in the German armv - , ~ rxi The fourth son, namely, the father of Lord Miner, came into the world at Neuss, his birth being registered. there on the 20th of June, 1830, under the'xGerman name of Karl. He received hia education at Bonn, at Giessen, and at Tubingen, where he took his medical "degree in 1856. In 1853, being then a medical student of twenty-throe,, he married at the British Consulate at Colongne. a Mrs Cromie. She was a widow, almost double his age, and was of Irish descent, being a daughter of Major-General Ready of the English army, some time Military Governor of the Isle of Man. A little less than a vear a&irwafrd their son Alfred, now

known as tlwfrQueen's Westminsters, Dr Milner took his family back to Germany, where be accepted a professor ship ai the University of Tubingen, and where his wife, who is said to have been a clever and intellectual woman, died en the eve of the outbreak ot the France-German war of 1870

Alfred, her son, the present, Lord Milner, was devoted to his mother. He inherited from her all her British ideas, views, prejudices and tastes. The union between mother and son was exceptionally close, and it was at her instance that he determined to grow np, not as a German, but as an Englishman.

When hi? father, after a brief period of widowhood, contracted another marriage with a German lady, Elsie von Walz, home at Tubingen ceased to he congenial, and as soon as possible Alfred secured the doctor's consent to the putting into execution of his mother's intentions, namely, to complete his edu-

cation in England. He, accordingly went to London, entered! King's Col>lege there and won a scholarship for Balliol at Oxford. Tins scholarship enabled him to get through the university with flying colors, carrying everything before him. The honors which he won included a fellowship of New College, which furnishes him with the means of reading for the bar. I understand that he receives that fellowship and the handsome stipend attached thereto to this day. Before proceeding any further with this brief sketch of his career it is necessary to point out that according to the laws of England Lord Milner is an no sense a. German but an Englishman. There is no evidence to show that his grandfather, James Richardson Milner, ever secured letters of naturalisation as a German citizen, or that he abjured his allegiance to the. crown of England. Neither did his father, who as shown above, served for some time in an English regiment, make any act of renunciation of allegiance to Great Britain.

Therefore Lord Milner, as the grandson of an unnaturalised Englishman resident in Germany, and as son of a father who had never taken the necessary steps to renounce the British citizenship which he had inherited from his own father, is legally entitled to be considered as an Englishman.

It is difficult to realise that the staid, the sober ,, the intensely dignified statesman who -is Lord Milner, whose impresIsivrt bearing and appearance—he ia built on large lines —are calculated to chill the unseemly levity, was for four years associated in an editorial capacity with the late William T. Stead, on the staff of tlio Pall Mall Gazette of London, which a decade or so afterward was to pass into the possession of Wilikm Waldorf Astor, now Lord Astor, and which has recently been bought by Sir Henry Dalzeil, proprietor of Reynolds' Weekly. If ever there was a strange union, it was the co-operation of two such entirely dissimilar men as Stead and Milner. They often clashed. What they thought of each other is no secret, for Milner, on one occasion described Stead in print as "a sort of compound of Don Quixote and Phineas T. Barnum," while Stead's views on the subject of Milner are to be found reeorued at. length in the ten or twelve pages in his Review of Reviews, devoted to a character sketch of his one time journalistic? subordinate. , Stead wrote plaintively that "Milner was always putting water into my wine and toning down my articles. He would squirm at my adjectives, reduce my superlatives and strike out everything that seemed to him calculated 1 to needlessly irritate or offend. When the editorial' lion opened his mouth Milner was always at hand to modulate the ferocity^of its roar. His task was most useful. But when he pruned he often cut to the quick". That is my abiding memorv of Milner on the Pall Mall.

One thing which used to exasperate Stead above everything else Was Milner's complete imperturbability—he called it lethargy—and his refusal to be roused into passion or vehemence. He never lost his temper, which was always even. •

It seems that Milner himself felt that

his impassiveness was in many respects a defect rather than an advantage, and that it had the result of leaving hi<? eloquence entirely cold and incapable of awakening the emotions of his listeners. One day he came down to the Pall Mall Office quite cheerful declaring that he had had a great success at a speech which he delivered the night before, somewhere in the east end of London. "Some one in the audience shouted to me: 'Sit down, you damned fool!' Then I metaphorically took oft my coat for that insult gave me just the blip I wanted. It waked me up all over." To which Stead was moved to reply: "Milner, I wish to goodness I could find my way to insult you every morning before we started work!" Milner abandoned journalism and! shortly afterward accepted an offer to become private secretary of the late Lord Goschen.

On the latter becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer Milner followed him into the Government service and thus conynenced his official carrier. He rendered himself invaluable, first of all to Goschen, and after him to Sir William Harcourt at the treasury, and when it became necessary to appoint an Englishman to the. post of Assistant Minist. er of Finance in Egypt, both Goschen and Harcourt united in recommendJng Milner to the well paid post. Association at Cairo with Lord Cromer and his daily experiences there of the difficulties then placed' in the way of Great Britain in Egypt by the various foreign Powers, broadened his mind and may be said to have laid in him the foundations of that statesmanship of which he has now become a master. Hi 9 experiences in Egypt where he won unstinted! pranse, are related in his book "England in Egypt," a wonderfully lucid description of the benefits which the land of the Nile has derived from British rule. He returned home after three years to take up the dtuties of chief of the Department of Inland Revenue, where he played a prominent role in the reorganisation of the civil service, in the creation of the present system of death duties, receiving first of all the Companionship and then the Star of Knight Commander, of the Order of the Bath. When Lord Rosmead, better known as Sir Hercules Robinson, broke down after the Jameson raid and was obliged to surrender the office of GovernorGeneral and High Commissioner of South Africa, both of the political parties united with Cecil Rhodes, the Empire Builder, and with Joseph Chamberlain, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, in declaring that there was but one man possessed of the necessary qualifications for the post and who was , fitted to cope with President Krugcr's intrigues with foreign Power?/ against British suzerainty, namely, Sir Alfred Milner. On the eve of his departure for the Cape he was entertained at a memorable banquet, at which the Ministers of the day joined with the leaders of the Opposition in wishing him God speed and in paying tribute to his brilliancy. One of the principal speeches on that occasion was delivered by Herbert Asquith. recently Premier. He declared that Sir Alfred took with him "as clear an intellect, as sympathetic an imagination, and if need should arise a power of resolut'on as tenacious and inflexible ?s belong to any man of their acAsquith added that this was "the testimony of a body of men who amid the tests and trials of many and varied conditions learned to rely with ever growing confidence upon the soundness of his judgment and tho

warmth of his heart," It was on the same occasion, if my memory serves me aright; that Dean Church referred to Milner as "the finest flower of human culture that Oxford has produced in our time:" while Lord Rosebery laid stress on Milnor's'

"union of intellect with fascination which makes men mount high, his breadth of view, and his practical w:sdom."

Sir Alfred Milner had no sooner reached the Cape than he set at once to work to master the South African Dutch patois, so as to be able to talkto the Africanders in their own language and without the assistance of an interpreter. Moreover, he visited every corner of his great satrapy in order to get into personal touch with the people of every class, Tace, creed and condition.

It was therefore with more than or-

is njbnsense. It eoiiM not have been averted 1 save at the sacrifice by Great Britain not alone of her suzerainty over the two Transvaal republics and'of all her immense gold and diamond mining mtrests within theip borders but also pf her other possessions in South Africa {Ddrnkng Natal, the Cape Colon? and Khodfcsia.

Milner remained at the head ol the civil administration of that portion of the Dark Continent throughout the entire Boer War, and then after, its close when the work of pacification began, he tell toul of Lord Kitchener, who after the departure of Lord Roberts had! remained invested with the military command in chief.

Thc quarrel between Milncr and Kitchener was very much of the same, kind as that between Kitchener and Ivord Lurzon in India, some years after- ■ ivarcte, namely a conflict between the civil and military authorities for su- ! P™cy and as Kitchener defied not oniy Milner, but also the Colonial Sec T,Fi J °f ph 9 hamberlain < and conducted independent negotiation with General Botha and the other Boer leaders Milner found the position untenable, and returned home, prompted i'loreover to resignation by the hostill it.\ of Rhodes and of the other Rand magnate,, who resented his refusal to lun the civil government of South -Africa for their benefit, that is to sav tor the multimillionaire coterie at .Johannesburg and Kimberlev instead of lor that of the people On his arrival in England. Milner was showered with honors. He was welcomed in state at the railroad sta- «?£ V Cl ?rt r ain . the Secretary of Mate tor the Colonies, and carried off by him straight to Buckingham Palace to receive recognition for his service*] from King Edward in the form of a peerage which later on was transferred from a barony into a viscounty. He subsequently went back to the Care with increased prestige and authority' to organise the great confederation now known as the Enion of South Africa ami remained there until the downfall' of the I monist Cabinet when he resigned and came home, After he held "no office until appointed a few months ago to the Lloyd George Cabinet as Minister without portfolio and as member of the War Council