[Footnote 115: "The Uitlander Council is keenly disappointed at the _Times_' announcement that the seven years' franchise is acceptable to the Imperial Government. We fear few will accept the franchise on this condition, so the result is not likely to abate unrest and discontent, nor redress pressing grievances. Such a settlement would not even approximate to the conditions obtaining in the Orange Free State and the [British] colonies, and would fail to secure the recognition of the principle of racial equality. We earnestly implore you not to depart from the High Commissioner's five years' compromise, which the Uitlanders accepted with great reluctance. The absolute necessity for a satisfactory settlement with an Imperial guarantee is emphasised by the insincerity and bad faith persistently shown during the Volksraad discussion of the Franchise Law."--C. 9,415.] [Sidenote: The relapse in England.] It is scarcely possible to believe that Mr. Chamberlain, with Lord Milner's telegrams before him, was himself prepared to accept President Krüger's illusory franchise scheme. The source of the weakness of the Government in the conduct of the negotiations, no less than in its refusal to make adequate preparations for war, is to be found in the inability of the mass of the people of England to understand how completely British power in South Africa had been undermined by the Afrikander nationalists during the last twenty years. How could the average elector know that the refusal or acceptance of the Volksraad Bill, differing only from the Bloemfontein minimum in an insignificant--as it seemed--particular of two years, would, in fact, make known to all European South Africa whether President Krüger or the British Government was master of the sub-continent? In view of this profound ignorance of South African conditions, and the consequent uncertainty of any assured support, even from the members of their own party, the Salisbury Cabinet may well have argued: "Here is something at last that we can represent as a genuine concession. Let us take it, and have done with this troublesome South African question; or leave it to the next Liberal Government to settle." If the Cabinet did so reason to themselves, what English statesman could have "cast the first stone" at them? But how profound is the interval between the spirit of the policy of "the man on the spot," with his eyes upon the object, and the spirit of the policy of the island statesman with one eye upon the hustings and the other strained to catch an intermittent glimpse of an unfamiliar and distant Africa! [Sidenote: Lord Milner's anxiety.]