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By Root 1151 0

were the former members of his South African Kindergarten of young aides, most of whom had returned to England and were fast rising in the world. His ambitious former private secretary John Buchan, for instance, although failing in attempts to gain a high post in the colonial service in Egypt or a seat in Parliament, began to find considerable success as a journalist and novelist. The empire needed praise-singers as well as civil servants, and the genial Buchan was ideally suited for that role. In his 1906 novel A Lodge in the Wilderness, a celebration of British rule in Africa, one character is modeled on Milner, and another defines imperialism in distinctly Milneresque terms: "It is a spirit, an attitude of mind, an unconquerable hope.... It is a sense of the destiny of England."

England's destiny, however, seemed to many to be under threat from a fast-rising Germany. Milner and Kipling were vigorous advocates of strengthening Britain's volunteer professional army with conscription. No longer, they felt, could the country rely for protection primarily on having the world's mightiest navy. "Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?" Kipling asked in one poem. It chafed at both men that young Britons, unlike their counterparts in France, Germany, and Russia, were not required to undergo army service. They worried particularly about a Germany that could easily mobilize millions of well-trained reservists.

Milner's view of the world changed not at all in these years leading up to 1914, but this was not true of his nemesis from Boer War days, Emily Hobhouse. After that war ended, she returned to South Africa for several years to work helping Boer women rebuild their shattered lives. During the war she had paid scant attention to the territory's black and brown majority, but now her outlook was broadening. She met a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi, who was battling for the rights of Indians in South Africa, and was profoundly impressed by his philosophy of nonviolence. When a monument to the concentration camp victims was unveiled, she sent a message to be read at the occasion, gently warning the assembled Boer leadership against "withholding from others in your control, the very liberties and rights which you have valued ... for yourselves." Coming home to Britain in 1908, she developed into an ardent socialist and campaigner for suffrage, both for women and for the millions of British men kept from voting by property qualifications.

A woman who had been in Milner's life in a different way, his mistress Cécile Duval, evidently had had enough of waiting. She married and moved to Canada. Milner showed momentary interest in one or two other women, but in the end no one took the place in his heart of Violet Cecil. With the mores of the time making divorce out of the question, she made one last attempt to breathe life into her marriage, moving to Egypt, where Edward was now stationed. But after the excitement of Milner's orbit in wartime Cape Town, she found colonial society in Cairo dry and constricted. Deeply ambitious, in an age in which a woman's aspirations had to be expressed through her husband, Violet had expected that Edward would leave the army and go into politics. Wasn't that the proper role for a former prime minister's son? In such circumstances, with her charm and gift for conversation, she would certainly have thrived. Yet Edward was determined to remain in Egypt, on what to her was the distant periphery of all that mattered. After some months, she returned to England. Their marriage, Edward's sister-in-law wrote years later, had been "a fatal mistake ... for never were two people more hopelessly unsuited."

In 1906, she settled in a stone manor house southeast of London that dated from 1635, named Great Wigsell, and the following year Milner found an elegant country home not far away. She helped him decorate his house, and they exchanged many visits, sometimes with others, often alone. Friends surely understood, and with Milner no longer in government and Violet's father-in-law