Mr. Philip Schreiner was the son of a German by birth, a missionary of the London Missionary Society, who had married an Englishwoman, and afterwards settled in the Orange Free State. He had himself married a sister of Mr. F. W. Reitz, formerly President of the Free State, and now State Secretary of the South African Republic. The Schreiner family was remarkable for intellectual power. Of his sisters one is the authoress of _The Story of an African Farm_, and a second, Mrs. Lewis, like her brother Theophilus, was an active Imperialist and a determined opponent of the Bond. Mr. Schreiner himself was educated at the South African College at Capetown, and subsequently at Cambridge, where he was placed first in the First Class of the Law Tripos, and afterwards elected a Fellow of Downing. After a successful career at the Cape Bar he was appointed Attorney-General in Mr. Rhodes's Ministry, a position which he held at the time of the Raid. He was prevented by his strong disapproval of the part then played by Mr. Rhodes from joining the Progressive party; and, having accepted the position of Parliamentary leader of the Bond, he had become, as we have seen, Prime Minister through the Bond victory in the Cape General Election of 1898. It is characteristic alike of Mr. Schreiner and of his political position that the only word of sympathy with the British connection, uttered from first to last during this election by the Bond candidates or their supporters, was the conventional reference to the greatness of the British Empire which, as we have noticed, occurred in his address to the electors of Malmesbury. With these political and social ties, Mr. Schreiner was compelled to be a South African first and a British subject second. His is precisely the kind of case where true allegiance can be expected only when a federal constitution has been created for the Empire. "See," said Lord Milner, in his farewell speech at Johannesburg, "how such a consummation would solve, and, indeed, can alone solve, the most difficult and most persistent of the problems of South Africa; how it would unite its white races as nothing else can. The Dutch can never own a perfect allegiance merely to Great Britain. The British can never, without moral injury, accept allegiance to any body politic which excludes their motherland. But British and Dutch alike could, without loss of integrity, without any sacrifice of their several traditions, unite in loyal devotion to an empire-state, in which Great Britain and South Africa would be partners, and could work cordially together for the good of South Africa as a member of that greater whole."[56] [Footnote 56: _The Johannesburg Star_, April 1st, 1905.]