Lord Milner: the Boers got their facts right |

Lord Milner: the Boers got their facts right

Like so many other official documents on South African affairs, Lord Milner's new despatches are belated admissions of unpleasant truths that independent observers have long insisted on in the face of official indifference.

The public were sceptical as to the extent of the devastation of the conquered countries. It was thought that some six hundred farms had been burnt and then the mischief had stopped. Great was the outcry when the Boer Generals in appealing for funds declared that the whole land was laid waste.

But now what is Lord Milner's account? "We began working," he writes, "with the country absolutely denuded of everything."

Lord Milner has a turn for rhetoric and he states the case a little more strongly than a sober and literal-minded Boer would do. A Boer would have mentioned prosaically that there were only a few thousand cattle left, or that many towns were wholly and many partially destroyed.

However, Lord Milner is merely admitting at length what the Boer leaders contended eight months ago. The country when the war ceased was laid waste from end to end. He passes on at once to a further admission. One of the complaints from the Boer side about the administration of relief turned on the condition of the animals supplied to them instead of a money grant out of the three millions.

It was said that the animals taken over from the military were in a miserable plight, and that many died before work could be got out of them. That was thought by many to be a slander, but what, again, does Lord Milner say? "The large number of animals which we took over from the military were for the most part in wretched condition.

"Hundreds of them died before they had done any work at all; many thousands were useless for several months, and were only gradually resuscitated by the greatest care and at considerable expense."

A further complaint came from those who had surrendered during the war under promise of British protection and who nevertheless had their property destroyed later on - sometimes by the British themselves.

We note such admissions in no spirit of controversy, but because we in England have frequently had the argument from common sense checked by the argument from authority. When common sense and knowledge of affairs seemed to show that events were turning out one way, we were told that they were turning in precisely the opposite way. Milner was British high commissioner in South Africa before the Boer war

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