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RHODES CHAPTER I THE MATOPPOS AND BISHOP STORTFORD I ‘ You worship Rhodes ? ’ George Meredith wrote to a lady. ‘ I would crown him and then scourge him with his crown still on him.’ He wrote on April 2nd, 1902. The Boer War had a month to go. Rhodes was dead a month. He died at the age of forty-eight, less pleasantly than he had supposed people did die of heart disease. ’ At any rate, Jameson, death from the heart is clean and quick. There’s nothing repulsive about it. It’s a clean death, isn’t it ? ’ But they say the heat at Cape Town that summer was a plague. Such summers come to Cape Town. Then the blue hydrangeas climbing up the mountain at Rhodes’ command lie pallid in their tracks, the whiteness of his house is a pain to the eyes, the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet and the wan air is not stirred by the gigantic embrace. And in such a heat Rhodes, his clothes unbuttoned, his face swollen and purple, his brow wet beneath his grey, tousled hair, wandered from room to room of Groote Schuur, his house, trying to breathe. He lay on a couch in the darkened drawing-room and could not breathe. He crouched on a chair at his desk and could not breathe. He laboured up to his bedroom and about it. He stood at the window that faced his mountain. Below him a regiment of flowers, in big, hard, brilliant, scentless masses, climbed the mountain slope by regular steps, and the trees he had lopped of their branches that screened the mountain, striped with black its purple and blue. But what would a man see of such things who could not breathe ? I B 2 He was carried to his cottage by the sea, and they made a hole in the wall to let in the air, and laid ice between the ceiling and the iron roof to cool it, and waved punkahs to stir it to life. Every day for two weeks his coloured man got ready a cart and horses to take him to his farm in the Drakenstein Mountains. But he was not called upon to inspan. Rhodes decided instead to go to England. It was cold now in England, Life seemed to be in that coldness. It was arranged that he should sail on March a6th, a cabin was fitted with electric fans and oxygen tubes and refrigerating pipes. He died on the day he should have left. A man might think the worshippings, crownings and scourgings of his world an equal futility who had given his name to a country and could not get a little air. Rhodes was born in an English vicarage on July 5th, 1853. He began in the little greenness of a place called Bishop Stortford and he ended in the granite desolation of a land called after himself. Rhodes rests in a grave of rock. Here he came to brood on mortality, and here he chose to be laid. Forests, grotesquely piled boulders, hurrying agitated monkeys lead to it. The approach is alive. But on the other side of this hill of granite, this glacier of black stone so smooth it is hard to climb, on the other side of this smooth, shining, black hill on which there lie carelessly, as if in an abandoned game of Brob- dingnags, stones round as sea-pebbles and large as houses, a world spreads itself of rough grey rocks spattered out on a .desert landscape like the final vomit of planets long since dead. In a cave near Rhodes sits the skeleton of the Matabele who taught him how a monarch who was also a poet should be buried. As the Matoppos to Bishop Stortford, so Moselikatze - 3 to the Williams, Thomases, and Samuels of Rhodes’ ancestry who farmed or made bricks or bought land in London and the country ; so Cecil Rhodes to the vicar, his father, whose sermons lasted exactly ten minutes. The meaning of Rhodes’ ancestry lies in its very lack of meaning. It proves merely that men like Rhodes come independent of their begetting and also of their land. And Rhodes himself recognized this when he set no name beside his own on his tombstone : not of ancestor or of birthplace. He was that being, Cecil John Rhodes, belonging to nobody, belonging to everybody-self-contained. He exemplified this largeness of spirit, this desire, for good or evil, to go big, which is called greatness and which is the attribute of no nation. For greatness is a sort of genius : a quality, not an accident or an achievement, a gift and not an inheritance. It inhabits a man like poetry or courage. The great man may not be better than the next man, he has his viscera like anybody else, and as there are minor poets there may even be lesser great men-village, if not world, great men. The point is that greatness is a kind of spiritual growth gland that makes for enlargement. The great man enlarges himself as the poet writes. He is equally conscious of his gift. He knows the mould he has to fill. He is dedicated to the work of filling it. It is the first sign of greatness in a man that he is aware of his greatness. ‘ Be not afraid of greatness ! ’ He is not afraid of greatness ! From the beginning he has asked Life, not, like a beggar, for a penny, but, like a creditor, for a pound. When Rhodes is here called great, the quality of bigness is meant. Rhodes used to say he left England, not so much from love of adventure or on account of his health, but because he could no longer stand the eternal cold mutton. What did he mean but that he wanted a larger life ? He came to South Africa when he was sixteen. His brother Herbert, the eldest son, was there before him. Cecil Rhodes was one of a family of twelve. He had a half-sister, two sisters, and nine brothers, two of whom died young. Of all this family of big-boned, questing, well-placed men and women only two married-the half-sister and Ernest, the brother following Cecil. Does it mean anything in par- ticular for so many people in a family not to marry, anything that would concern scientists ? Or is it that things are some- times just simply what they are, and the Rhodeses were captured by adventure and it would not release them to the prosaic business of settling down ? The Rhodes men, descend- ants, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, of cowkeepers, brickmakers, landowners-not to mention their parson father-were soldiers or emigrants. Their father had wanted them all to become parsons. But they were not of those who remain quietly at home. To this extent Cecil was like his brothers. But his brothers had not his ruthlessness, his imagination, his brains, that capacity for utter absorption in an idea which was his genius and made him Rhodes. If Rhodes’ mind found something to engage it, that was all he could think of, that was all he could talk about, that was the crux (one of his favourite words) the crux of every- thing. An idea would appear to him in a certain form, in a certain combination of words, and he could not bring himself to express it in any other but that form or combination. Over and over again the same thought, the same phrase would come out, not to be abandoned until every possible relation to it had been explored. Rhodes is supposed never to have made a note for his speeches. But, actually, he rehearsed them, sometimes to the point of boredom, in his conversations, for he talked of nothing but what concerned him at the moment. And it merely depended on the kind of thought it was-a minor one or a major one, a thought of few facts or many 5 facts--it depended on how long it took him to explore this thought, whether he held it an hour, a year or a lifetime. Some thoughts he did not give up in his lifetime. He spoke of them as thoughts. ’ I am giving you these thoughts.’ 6 If I may put to you my thoughts.’ ‘ I will give you the history of a thought.’ ‘ Work with these thoughts.’ ‘ The North is my thought.’ ‘ Co-operation is my thought.’ . . . This force of concentration was the difference between Rhodes and his brothers, between Rhodes and people who are not like Rhodes. His sister Edith is said to have resembled him. His sister Edith, however, became no Hester Stanhope or Gertrude Bell or Florence Nightingale. To match Cecil Rhodes that is what she should have become. Unproved potentialities are the spirits of the dead whose limits may be the universe, but they merely tap a table. There are no mute inglorious Miltons. The point about a Milton is precisely that he is neither mute nor inglorious. Although Cecil adventured to South Africa to join Herbert, in the end, of course, most of the brothers buzzed about Cecil. One, Arthur Montagu, found himself a farmer near Bulawayo, and, after the Matabele rising, he put in a claim for mealies destroyed. When it was discovered that the meals had never existed he explained that he had an arrange-ment for supplying the natives with seed-grain, and sharing the resulting crops with them. The seed had not been planted on account of the rising. Therefore he wanted reparation. Cecil wrote across his brother’s claim : ‘ This is the most impudent claim that has yet been submitted.’ Of his brother Bernard he said : ‘ Ah, yes, Bernard is a charming fellow. He rides, shoots and fishes. In fact, he is a loafer.’ . He said to one of his secretaries : ‘ I have four brothers, each in a different branch of the British Army, and not one of them could take a company through Hyde Park Gate.’ Herbert, the chief Rhodes wanderer, camping solitary in :-... .- -. . 6 Africa, opened a cask of gin. It caught fire, and he was burnt to death. Frank was a man of charm, popular with men, and still more with women. People speak much of his delightfulness. Two months before the Jameson Raid he took the place of his brother Ernest as Cecil’s representative in Johannesburg on his gold companies. He found himself caught up in intrigues foreign to his easy nature and ended as one of the leaders in the movement that led to the Raid. With three others he was sentenced to death, but all four were released on payment of a fine. Kruger said of Frank Rhodes that he was the only man among the rebels who knew his business. His fellows thought otherwise. They merely said : ‘ Dear old Frankie.’ Men who knew him in those days still speak of him as Frankie. The name of Cecil does not yield itself to diminutives. But no one ever called the big Rhodes even Cecil. He was called Rhodes as a boy at school. He was called The Old Man when he was thirty-and by men twice his age. Frankie was not only popular but honest. He clearly told the truth at the Inquiry that followed the Raid. The inheritors of Rhodes’ estate in England were the descendants of Ernest, and it was they who were compelled by Rhodes’ will to work before entering into their possession. IV Unlike his elder brothers, Rhodes had not been sent to Winchester or Eton. There must have come a limit, even for a man wealthy enough to build a church, to sending sons to Winchester or Eton. Cecil went to the Bishop Stortford Grammar School, and his career there may be judged from the blighting fact that he won a medal for elocution. He left this school when he was sixteen, and read under his father. He had an idea he might like to become a clergy- man or a barrister. But then he was found to be 7 and sent out to Herbert in Natal. He arrived on September 1st, 1870, after a seventy-days’ voyage, and joined Herbert as a cotton planter. He was entitled, as an immigrant, to fifty acres of land to be paid for in five years. In Natal, for a year, he struggled against caterpillar, bore-worm, and his own inexperience ; made friends with a youth related to the Provost of Oriel, and invested his earliest savings in a new local railway. Then he followed Herbert, always the impatient pioneer, to the newly discovered diamond fields in Griqualand West. He was now eighteen. At this age Clive was shipped to India. At this age, too, Warren Hastings went to India. And at this age Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist, born an Englishman in the West Indies, wrote a series of papers in defence of the rights of the American colonies as against England. Rhodes is not known to have remarked on the man who, a century earlier, helped to federate America as he wished to federate Africa, but he did once speak to W. T. Stead of those Englishmen (‘ so low have we fallen ! ‘) who considered it a good thing that England had lost the United States. ‘ There are some subjects on which there can be no argument, and to an Englishman this is one of them. But even from an American point of view just picture what they have lost. . . .’ ‘ Fancy,’ he writes later in his open letter to Stead, ‘ the charm to young America to share in a scheme to take the government of the world.’ The government of the world was Rhodes’ simple desire. CHAPTER II THE SOUTH AFRICA TO WHICH RHODES CAME I SOUTH AFRICA is no less sentimental than other lands. It likes to refer to itself, first, as a young country ; second, as a country made safe and sweet for a white civilization by ,its ancestry of pioneers. It forgets that, like America, it was settled by people who came from the great civilizations of Europe, and grew uncivilized in the process of pioneering. It ignores the contradiction of the two boasts, their mutual cancellation. There are no young countries to-day-no countries right-fully immature. To which country is the past now not an equal inheritance and the present an open declaration ? We are alike as old as history, the press that prints, the steam and gas that draw, the wires and the waves that speak. If in this twentieth century a country remains young it is suffering from arrested development. And then the pioneers, the early settlers. In South Africa, as in America, there is talk of these pioneers and those settlers. In the United States they say the real America is the Middle West because the descendants of pioneers live there and work the land. These are held to be purer Americans than the inhabitants of New York because the British, Dutch, Swedish, French, German, Scottish, and Irish blood in them is an older mixture, Yet no one has demonstrated why the meaning of a country should lie in its earliest comers unless they have done something beside come first ; why, except in a race, there is any merit in doing a thing first apart from that which attaches to the demonstration of its possibility. Nor is the meritorious necessarily the significant. Pioneering is still going on in various parts of South Africa, 9 and one can see with one’s own eyes that pioneers are not always better than other people. The very foreignness of New York may be the essential America. If no white man had come to South Africa before 1870 the South Africa of to-day would have been, materially, little different, and, spiritually, not, in every sense, worse. Old roots, old bonds, dear traditions, might not have been there, and the dignity of long possession, and, among tangible things, some noble houses and furniture. But also a few old hatreds might not have existed ; and, courageous and touching as was the advance of the pioneers through the unknown-a thing admirable in itself of which the memory may well be treasured-the actual effect of that advance : the clearing of the land of savages, its tentative cultivation, could now be achieved in two or three years with the aid of a certain number of machine guns and motor tractors. Nor are generations needed to create a feeling for Africa. It is a land that does not softly melt the heart, but that seizes (as it seized Rhodes) with a swift and passionate grip. Pioneers-pioneers anywhere-struggling along, living hard and painfully, leave a sentiment, but little else ; for they have small help for their minds, and their energy goes out in sweat. Art, thought, and invention come with ease, and are nourished, as the history of nations through the centuries show, by prosperity. When the times are stirring and triumphant, desires arise : body, sense, and spirit alike demand gratification ; and the creator is stimulated to provide that gratification. South Africa did not exist for the world, and hardly for itself, until its gold and diamonds were discovered. II The story of gold in South Africa is an older story than the story of diamonds. They say the Phoenicians once landed on the coast of Mozambique and came to dig for gold in the country destined to bear Rhodes’ name, that they worshipped Baa1 and Astarte there and sacrificed black bulls as some African tribes do to this day. Even the gold of Solomon’s Temple, they say, came from Africa, and Southern Rhodesia they call the very land of Ophir, and from the River Sabi (they declare) rose Sheba’s name. The stories are pretty, and Rhodes liked to think of them, but scientists are no longer sure that the ruins in Rhodesia from which such dreams arise are anything but the work of: Africans, and so perhaps Milton was better informed when he spoke of Sofala as Ophir :1
The second was the discovery of the same farmer. It was being used by a native witch-doctor in his wizardry business, and the farmer bought it for 500 sheep, 10 oxen and a horse -all he had. But he knew a diamond now when he saw it. The stone weighed 83 carats, he sold it for over eleven thou-sand pounds to a trader who resold it for twenty-five thou- sand. This diamond is called ‘ The Star of South Africa.’ There were experts who regarded the two diamonds as freaks. One such expert, whose name was Gregory, reported that there was no diamondiferous ground in South Africa. Hence a blunder came to be known in South Africa as a Gregory. And now people began to look for diamonds. Two years later they were found in various places over a stretch of eighty miles along the Vaal River. Still another year later they were picked up on the open veld, and the Boers who owned the farms on that veld, which now hold the greatest diamond mines in the world, thankfully sold these farms for two thou- sand, two thousand six hundred, six thousand pounds, packed their ox-waggons and again trekked into the emptiness-away from the vultures swooping down on the land and picking bare its bones. And so Kimberley began. ‘ Mombaza, and Quiloa and Melind, And Sofala, called Ophir, to the realm Of Congo and Angola farthest South.’ Who knows but that Milton once studied the map of Africa ‘ done into English by I. S. (John Speed) and published at the charges of G. Humble Ano 1626,’ which, among such informa-tion as ‘ here the Amazons are said to inhabit,’ ‘ The King of Guinea is adored by the common people,’ ‘ The sons of the Emperor of CEthiopia are held inward in a hill,’ points out-in the wrong place-‘Here is gold digged up in great quantities ’ ? Diamonds, although Anthony Trollope once heard an American lecturer speak of a mission map, printed in 1750, on which was written ‘ Here be diamonds ’ (’ I have not,’ comments Trollope, ‘ seen such a map. . . . Such a map would be most interesting if it could be produced ‘), diamonds were not found in South Africa until 1867. In this year a Dutch farmer saw a neighbour’s children playing at marbles, and one of the stones was white and bright. The farmer admired the stone, and it was given him. He showed it to some diamond merchants, who con-sidered it worthless. He had it sent to a mineralogist who valued it at &oo. At this price it was bought by the Governor of the Cape, who allowed it to be displayed. That is the history of the first diamond found in South Africa. It is reported that, in later years, old man de Beer protested to his wife that he should have asked, not six thousand, but six million pounds for his land (John here-My wife is a descedant on the female side from the original De Beer-she has no money) ‘ But what would we have done with all that money ? There are only the two of us, and this house is big enough. We have our front-room, and our bedroom, and our kitchen. What more do we want ? ’ ‘ We could have had a new wagon.’ ‘ We have enough to buy twenty new wagons.’ ‘ And a new Cape cart to go to service-to Nachtmaal.’ ‘ That, too, we can afford. . . . Ach, my little heart, be easy. What have we to trouble about ? We have enough.’ But the people who followed old de Beer and his wife could never have enough. All over South Africa there those who made fortunes in Kimberley, and could not have enough ; who, like the fisherman of the fairy-tale, began in a hovel and wished for more and more until the world itself was too little for them, and the charm broke and they were back in their little old hovel again. It is appropriate that Rhodes should have come to Kimberley in the very month of England’s proclamation to her rivals and the world that Griqualand West-Kimberley-the Diamond Fields-was British territory. What right had England to the Diamond Fields ? What right had anybody? There are a people in South Africa who complacently call themselves the Bastaards (officially the Griquas) because the blood in them is a mixture of white, Hottentot, and Bantu. Early in the century missionaries had helped them to settle in the land that is now Griqualand West, and there they had killed off the Bushmen ad established a Government. They had then wandered thus way and that along the Orange River ; claimed rights in what is now the Orange Free State ; sold them to the Boers for four thousand pounds ; and finally crossed the da Drakensberg to found the new dominion of Griqualand cast. When diamonds were discovered in Griqualand West England said Griqualand West was the possession of one Nicholaas Waterboer, of the royal line of Bastaard Waterboers, . Waterboer wanted England to take over his country. against this, the Orange Free State, existing, at the moment, on paper money, protested that, since she had taxpayers there, Griqualand West was hers ;and the Transvaal, recently unable to float a loan of three hundred pounds, said No, there were certain concessions, it was hers. At a village on the Vaal River the diggers hoisted a republican flag, and elected as president Stafford Parker, at one time an able seaman in the British Navy. 13 From this distance of time it all seems merely comic : hereditary ruler Nicholaas Waterboer, the Bastaard ; President Parker, A.B. ; the failure of the three-hundred-pound Transvaal loan flotation ; the cessions of kingdoms by this vagrant half-Hottentot or that. But behind the comedy was the first wealth that had ever come to South Africa, hitherto a poor and humble country, whose golden air was no use for barter. Much bitterness flowed from the rivalry for the Diamond Fields. And although the Transvaal withdrew her claim without much further talk, and President Parker hauled down his flag to make way for England, the Free State has not yet overcome the feelings with which she accepted from England, in full settlement of her rights, the sum of ninety thousand pounds. Into this atmosphere of treasure and intrigue, of concession, claim and Imperial passion, walked the tall, thinking youth, Cecil John Rhodes. To this Imperial passion, despite the fact that he himself never matched his ideal of an Englishman, to such a passion Rhodes could not have been a stranger when he arrived in Kimberley. He may have had-he did have-the kind of genius that entranced the legal world when Rufus Isaacs, without refer-ence to his documents, cross-examined Whittaker Wright for hours on questions of finance. Rhodes, too, learnt to do that sort of thing. His speech concerning the amalgamation of all the diamond mines and the buying out of his rivals is nine thousand words long, it is as detailed as it seems clear and simple, and he made it, so they say, without looking at a note. Nor was this the sort of speech to be rehearsed, as others, in conversation. . . . Again, if photographs and anecdotes are any guide, Rhodes may have developed the face, not so definitely as he imagined of a Roman Emperor as of a rather impressive Hebrew financier (a secretary of his tells how he was once mistaken for a Jewish trader by his own Rhodesians). . . . Still, Jewish genius or Jewish face, a Jew he was not. He was, on the contrary, the son of a Church of England clergy- man. He belonged to a family that, in the English manner, sent its sons from parsonages to playing-fields and battle- grounds. The family even moved in those circles that are called ‘ county.’ As it happens, he himself was of those natural merchants at sight of whom, according to Emerson, Nature herself seems to authorize trade ; whom, indeed, as he says, she elevates from the ranks of private agents to be her very factors and Ministers of Commerce. Rhodes could not, therefore, be so limited as to express in his person merely a national ideal. Nevertheless, he had always in his mind the sense of his English background. It directed his aims and strengthened his dealings. When, for instance, there was the question as to who should control the diamond mines, he, or the East End Jew, Barney Barnato, Rhodes played as one of his trump cards membership of the Kimberley Club. For Barnato might be a millionaire ; he might buy a house in Park Lane ; he might, in the year whose end was to see also the end of Rhodes’ triumphant ascent, avert, through his dealings, a panic on the London Stock Exchange-he could not, until Rhodes worked it, achieve what a man who had an Old England behind him found waiting in his path : he could not get into the little iron-roofed Kimberley Club. Membership, then, of the Kimberley Club was one of the things Rhodes offered Barnato when they were playing for the diamond mines. It went into the scale. ‘ This is no mere money transaction,’ he said to Barnato. ‘ I propose to make a gentleman of you.’ It seems incredible that a gentleman should have said it, or a man accepted it. One has to allow much for the mitigating smile or gesture. The fact remains that Barnato‘5 to let Rhodes make a gentleman of him by getting him into the Kimberley Club. Barnato had as good a business head as Rhodes. But Rhodes, and not Barnato, came to control de Beers, because Rhodes had this advantage over Barnato : he could play with other things than money. Barnato had only money, and in the end he found it not enough. If Rhodes did not realize the advantage of being English in blood and bone before he arrived in Kimberley, he learnt to appreciate it there. In this cosmopolitan hotbed being English seemed more than an advantage, it seemed a rare and lovely virtue. The time came when Rhodes could say of a man (it was his friend, Earl Grey) : ‘ Take heed of him, all of you, for in him you see one of the finest products of England . . . an English gentleman.’ It was in Kimberley that Rhodes learnt many things about England, and, first of all, by immediate example, how England went about annexing countries, and, second, how she justified such annexation. V Kimberley is an ugly town. It is an ugly town to-day. But when Anthony Trollope saw it six years after Rhodes sorted his first wash he said that an uglier place he did not know how to imagine. There had been no rain, Trollope reports, for months. The temperature was a hundred and sixty degrees in the sun and ninety-seven degrees in the shade. There was not a tree within five miles, nor a blade of grass within twenty, nor a house of anything but corrugated iron, nor food fit to eat. There were no pavements. The roadways were of dust and holes. The atmosphere was of dust and flies. ‘ I seemed to breathe dust rather than air.
main street of Kimberley where to-day there are only The house was small, ugly, hot and uncomfortable-a working man, at thirty pounds a month, would Sir James Rose Innes, later in Rhodes’ Cabinet, and still later. Chief Justice of the Union, describes how, in the year Rhodes entered Parliament, this house looked. A corrugal shanty. Soiled and tumbled bedclothes on an ir-n bed. A Gladstone bag for a bolster. . . . It was one of the Kimberley spectacles : how a man lived who was in Par and had just floated a company for two hundred thousand pounds. its first davs and But Rhodes was happy in it. All over South Africa one may still meet men who loved Kimberley in love it now. It is perhaps their youth in Kimberley they really love, the eagerness that will not come again, the thought of those days when wealth dropped on men as in dreams. And they could be young and rich who are now merely I rich. But, whether it is this or that, still their hearts draw them to Kimberley. So it was not the ugliness of Kimberley that set Rhndes dreaming of English things. It was not the town its, it was, very likely, almost certainly, the people in it. What sort of people-the natives apart-came to dig in Kimberley ? They are described by old-timers, by one or two scurrilous writers of those days, by several not so scurrilous, also by Froude and Trollope. Froude compares them to a squalid Wimbledon camp. ‘ Bohemians of all nations,’ he says-American and Australian 17 -diggers, German speculators, traders, saloon-keepers, pro--ional gamblers. . . . 1 Thev mav be the germ of a great future colonv. or the diamonds may give you; and they may disappear like’ a locust swarm. It is impossible to say. The diggers were in a state of incipient insurrection when I arrived.’ Trollope comments on the vacuousness of their existence. 4 I am often struck by the amount of idleness,’ he says, ‘ which people can allow themselves whose occupations have diverged from the common work of the world. . . . I can conceive no occupation on earth more dreary-hardly any more demoralizing than this of perpetually turning over dirt in quest of a peculiar little stone which may turn up once a week or may not. I could not but think . . . of the comparative nobility of the work of a shoemaker who by every pull of his thread is helping to keep some person’s foot dry.’ One may judge by these descriptions, particularly by Trol-lope’s comment on the idleness of the digger, that the early Kimberley must have been much like the diggings of to-day. Indeed, even worse. For today there is the cinema, the train and the motor-car. The digger is not cut off from the world. In Rhodes’ time in Kimberley the diversions were drinking, gambling, coloured prostitutes, an occasional boxing-match, dance or amateur entertainment. And the diggers (except for the occasional decent youngsters, gaily adventurous, and the anxious strivers that go everywhere), the diggers were the derelicts of other worlds and other occupations ; men reckless, feckless, unable to work for themselves, unable to work for a master, with nothing to lose and only luck to hope for. As soon as this luck gave out they would expect to hurry away, and their conduct would not be regulated by the fears and responsibilities of the citizen who remains where he must answer to-morrow for his actions of yesterday. When one reads in the shabby chronicles of those days of the practical jokes, the adorable bar-ladies, the houses of ill 18 fame, the girls,‘ slightly off-colour,’ put up to auction, drinking, prize-fighting, concerts, racing, gambling, ru around-it seems that the old Kimberley life may have a vicious life, but it was also a bright life, full of movem So, probably, those who think wistfully of the old days remember it. The facts are otherwise. People naturally select o invent the interesting things to write about. They do they cannot, record the procession of those days on nothing happened. Men drink and gamble and go native women in such places as the early Kimberley b life there is as boring as existence on an aeroplane. T for luck is the most tedious, heart-lowering of experi To wait for luck is the lot of the diamond digger in days, and it was the lot of the diamond digger in Rhodes days. Nor did this luck come to all. Nor, before it found that the real hoard of diamonds was in the blue ground below the yellow ground, were great fortunes made. ‘ A man with a thousand pounds was considered well off.’ Rhodes own brother Herbert, the first Rhodes in Africa and on Fields, the one who was later burnt to death, gave up diamonds digging and went to look for his fortune in the n covered goldfields at Pilgrim’s Rest-in that large, tract of Lydenburg which the Boers bought from natives for a hundred head of breeding cattle. His Frank, who had come out on his advice, returned to to take up his commission in the cavalry. Certainly men made fortunes in Kimberley. A sco men-more than half of them Jews-made extremely fortunes. But not at once, not in the early seventies, no the days when Rhodes pumped water and sold ice-cream bought the claims of those prepared to abandon them. |
