states which were determined to enforce white rule. He succeeded however, in preserving a remnant of the multi-racial qualified franchise within the Cape Province. This result greatly disappointed Merriman and his allies, for whom the only possible justification of the Boer war had been to serve to eradicate the Transvaal's colour bar. Merriman had originally been proposed as the first Prime Minister of the new union, and several of the constituent states, such as the Orange Free State, supported him for this position. However Lord Gladstone, the first Governor-General, asked the Afrikaner statesman, Louis Botha to form a government. This decision, inspired partly by British liberal guilt over the Boer War and a desire to make reparations to the Afrikaner people, ended up empowering reactionary political elements of the Transvaal and cementing the franchise distinctions across the new country. Merriman declined to accept a post in the first Union Cabinet. Career in the Union parliament After union, he continued to serve in the Parliament of South Africa, representing first the constituency of Victoria West, and then Stellenbosch. He carried on a lively correspondence with Jan Christiaan Smuts, constantly warning him about possibilities of rebellion and civil war with Afrikaner sections of the white population who objected to South African cooperation with Great Britain against Germany in World War I, especially the South African invasion of German South-West Africa, now Namibia. He was one of only a few members of Parliament who opposed the Native Land Act in 1913, which was legislation that drastically limited African ownership of land. Political legacy Merriman has subsequently been hailed as a brilliant but paradoxical statesman. An outspoken individualist, his career was marked by dramatic changes in his political position, but also by growing liberal convictions. Significantly, this painful evolution in his views early on saw him entirely change his attitude towards the Cape's Black citizens, from a deep prejudice when he first arrived in the Cape, to an attitude of enlightened respect. John Molteno noted this change with great approval in 1874 before appointing Merriman to his first cabinet position, and credited the persuasive arguments of liberal parliamentarians such as Saul Solomon as the transforming influence (Cape Argus, 1874). For much of his career, in spite of his obvious ability, Merriman found himself in a liberal minority — fighting on two fronts against both the pro-imperialist "Progressives" of Rhodes and Milner, and the reactionary