As it was, Lord Milner was placed in a position of great embarrassment. If he "used plain language" he exposed himself to the charge of entering upon the discussion in an aggressive spirit, calculated to make agreement difficult. If he adopted a conciliatory tone, his arguments seemed to be nothing more than the abortive protests with which the grim old President had cheerfully filled the republican waste-paper basket for the last ten years. It has been suggested that Lord Milner might have obtained a better result if he had shown himself less "inflexible"; if, in short, he had been willing to accept a "compromise." But any such criticism is based upon an entire misunderstanding of the method which the High Commissioner did, in fact, adopt. The five years' franchise--the Bloemfontein minimum--was in itself a compromise. What Lord Milner said, in effect, to President Krüger was this: "I have a whole sheaf of grievances against you: the dynamite monopoly, excessive railway rates, interference with the independence of the judiciary, a vicious police system, administrative corruption, municipal abuses, and the rest. I will let all these go in exchange for one thing--a franchise reform which will give at once to a fair proportion of the Uitlander population some appreciable representation in the government of the Republic." Lord Milner not only offered a compromise, but a compromise that enormously reduced the area of dispute. His "inflexibility" arose from the simple fact that, having readily and frankly yielded all that could be yielded without sacrificing the paramount object of securing a permanent settlement of the Uitlander question, he had nothing further to concede, and said so. [Sidenote: President Krüger.]