AFRICA, UNION OF.) In the course of the war the members of the Schreiner cabinet were divided on the question of the treatment of the Cape rebels; and on Schreiner's resignation, a new ministry, under Sir G. Sprigg, took office (June 19, 1900). On Feb. 28, 1901, Lord Milner left Cape Town to take up his appointment as governor of the Transvaal and Orange River colonies. He was succeeded by Sir W. Hely-Hutchinson as governor of Cape Colony, but re tained the high commission, which was thus separated for the first time from the governorship of the Cape. In the same year a new party, styled the "Progressive," was formed in the colony, of which, on the death of Rhodes (March 26, 1902), Dr. (after wards Sir Starr) Jameson became leader. After the war was ended (May 31, 1902) a Progressive ministry, with Jameson as prime minister, was placed in power by the general election of Feb. 1904; and this ministry was succeeded, on the defeat of the Progressives at the polls by the South African party, by the ministry of Mr. J. X. Merriman in 1908. In the meantime, the four colonies, which had barely emerged from a ruinous con flict in arms, were confronted by the prospect of an economic war scarcely less injurious. In 1906 the Customs Union, insti tuted in 1903, failed to adjust the financial and industrial inter ests of the four separate governments, and it seemed that a disastrous competition in tariffs and railway rates for the trade of the Rand could be averted only by a common administration. The first step towards this long-sought goal of South African statesmanship was taken by Jameson, as prime minister of Cape Colony, when on Nov. 28, 1906, he formally requested Lord Selborne (by whom Lord Milner had been succeeded in 1905) to "review the situation." The response was the federation mem orandum of 1907, in which the high commissioner, availing him self of the work of Mr. Lionel Curtis and other advocates of "closer union," trenchantly demonstrated the impossibility of settling the outstanding disputes on fiscal and railway questions by any other method than the administrative union of the four colonies concerned in them. The Merriman ministry was equally in favour of closer union, and in 1908 the national convention met at Durban. On Sept. 20, 1909, the South Africa Act, of which the draft had been completed at Bloemfontein on May II, received the royal assent; and on May 31, 1910, Cape Colony became Cape Province in the Union of South Africa. At that date the colony had a population of 2,563,024, of whom 583,177 were European and 1,545,308 non-European; and it thus con tributed nearly one-half of both the European (1,278,025), and the total (4,061,082) population of the union. (See SOUTH