[CTRL] Rhodes- S G Millin 3

J Taylor Sat, 22 Apr 2000 05:08:48 -0700

1 CHAPTER IV

THE DISCIPLE OF RUSKIN

I Great men begin early and are long young. At the age of eleven Alexander Hamilton, a man in youth, but for ever a boy, became a warehouseman’s assistant. At thirteen he was managing the business : correspondence, staff, and cargo dealings. At fifteen he sent himself to school.

Rhodes was not quite so precocious. He was a farmer at seventeen, a diamond-digger at eighteen, a man of means at nineteen, and an undergraduate at twenty.

That, in itself, is not so remarkable. Many men have worked before going to college, and in order to go to college, and to keep themselves there. What is remarkable is the way Rhodes now arranged his life. He conducted it simultaneously in two continents. In one he knew the out flung, bobbing, careering, far-swept flotsam of thirty nations, and, in the other, the fruit of generations of care and particular tradition. He experienced side by side a youth and a manhood. He was together earthy and airy. At Oxford he was concerned with the fortune-snatching of Kimberley, and at Kimberley with the philosophizing of Oxford. In the dust of Kimberley he read his classics, and beneath the poetized spires of Oxford he negotiated for his pumping-plants.

The return journey from Kimberley to Oxford was, in those days, a matter of three or four months’ travelling.

One might imagine that such a course of life would provoke attention. Yet neither the college that rejected him nor the college that accepted him seems to have thought that here was something notable. The memories concerning Rhodes at Oxford are meagre and dull. The most interesting, because the most candid, recollection of Rhodes by a contemporary has it that, although there were among Rhodes’ fellows some

28 of whom one might have expected to hear again in a world 6 some degrees larger than Oxford,’ even Rhodes himself would admit ‘ that if he personally felt as young men are apt to feel that he had it in him to be, or to do, something great, he did not betray his secret.’

Twenty-five years later, says this writer, Rhodes told him that he was wrong. Already at Oxford he had been filled with the ideas which came to inspire his effort and life.

That Rhodes was not lying may be judged from words he wrote at Oxford, his mind buzzing with the exhortations of Ruskin and the ethics of Aristotle.

‘ You have instincts, religion, love, money-making, ambition, art and creation, which, from a human point of view I think the best, but if you differ from me, think it over and work with all your soul for that instinct you think the best.’

There was a lecture Ruskin gave at Oxford in which he spoke of ‘ a destinv now possible to us. the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace . . . ? This is what England must do or perish. She must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of the most energetic and worthiest of men ; seizing any piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.’

Here, it seems, were the words that gave form to Rhodes’ desert dream.

Strange to think of this geyser spouting up just fifty years ago. The Ruskins of our day toll a knell with Isaiah : ‘ Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy.’

But so it had to happen. A man born most English had to be driven by illness to a far continent. And in the very year of his coming precious stones had to appear that he might be enriched for what was to follow. And illness again had to send him on a long journey through brooding wastes, and in the hot, bright silence the desire for these wastes had to fever his blood.

Then he had to voyage back to merge himself once more in the traditions of his kind. And here he had to be in a place where, at just this time, an apostle of beauty must choose to speak not only, as by right, of pictures and stones and workmen, but also of such dreams as had once been Raleigh’s.

Who dare now chant with Shakespeare of royal thrones of kings and sceptred isles, and with Ruskin of fruitful wastes to be seized for the advancing of a nation’s power ? It was easy to shout glory in Ruskin’s time when life was at its swell, and the vanity of nations brought sorrow only to the weak.

Not every nation had yet experienced the older prophecy : ‘ Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas ; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing.of mighty waters. . . . They shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.’ The boy Rhodes was ripe for Ruskin’s heroic message, it was the time also of Disraeli.

To the words of Ruskin he linked the thoughts of Winwood Reade and the discoveries of Darwin, and out of this curious compound evolved his creed.

II This was his reasoning :

He began by assuming, says W. T. Stead, that there was a fifty-per-cent. chance a God existed.

Take it a God did exist.

What would this God want of Man ?

It was a question Rhodes was prepared to answer. God would want man not only to look like him, but to act like him.

Man, therefore, had to find out what God was doing, and do he same.

What was God doing ? Darwin had said it. God was perfecting the race through natural selection and the weeding out of the unfit. It remained merely for man to follow this lead and God’s will was done.

The eyes of Rhodes were after God. He looked to see what, in this process of selection and elimination, God had achieved. Which, among all the peoples, had he brought to flower ?

With all modesty, Rhodes could not help admitting that it was the English-speaking peoples that followed the highest ideal of Justice, Liberty and Peace : the people of Great Britain, her Dominions, and America.

The conclusion was clear. If Rhodes wished to please and follow God, he had, in whatever way he could, to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race.

To himself, personally, he allotted the task of Africa.

In Rhodes’ second term at Oxford his lungs, not yet strong enough to withstand the damp of England, were injured afresh by a chill caught while rowing. It was now a doctor wrote down in his case-book (Rhodes himself later saw it) that he had not six months to live.

Rhodes gave up Oxford for two years, returned to Kimberley, and there began to work out a plan of life.

In 1876 he returned to Oxford. In 1877, spending the long vacation in Kimberley, he composed a document which, many years later, he sent to W. T. Stead.

‘ It often strikes a man,’ says the document, grappling still, in the worrying Rhodes way, with his Ruskin-Darwin-Aristotle theme, ‘ to inquire what is the chief good in life. To one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, to a third travel, and so on, and as each seizes the idea, he more or less works for its attainment for the rest of his existence. To myself, thinking over the same question, the wish came to make myself useful to my country. . . . I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory provides for the birth of more of the English race, who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to which the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars.’ And here and now he decides that he will work’ for the furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole civilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race into one Empire. What a dream ! But yet it is probable ! It is possible ! ’

In the same year, accordingly, he draws up the first of those six wills in which, in one form or another, he bequeaths his fortune to the purpose of extending British rule throughout the world.

In this particular will a secret society is to carry out his scheme, and a system of emigration is to be perfected for colonizing ‘ all lands where the means of livelihood are attain-able by energy, labour and enterprise.’ The whole continent of Africa is to be settled by Britons, and also the whole continent of South America, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, and, finally, the United States. In the end Great Britain is to establish a power so overwhelming that wars must cease and the millennium be realized.

This will, like its explanatory credo, he gave to W. T. Stead with instructions that it was not to be opened until after his death.

33 Remembering that at the time Rhodes made the will he was twenty-four, an undergraduate at Oxford, and not unique among the young moneymakers of Kimberley, one may forgive oneself for finding this provision-the provision that the will is not to be opened until after Rhodes’ death-the only sane one in the whole scheme. Children of eight or ten are given to speculating on what they would do if they had twenty million pounds. It is perhaps well that, as Stevenson says, ‘ most men are so wise (or the poet in them so dead) that they keep their follies to themselves.’ An inhibition or two is cheap at the price. Imagine a man of twenty-four solemnly donating a fortune not yet made to the end of Britain’s absorption of the globe !

The will itself is not more astounding than the fact that Rhodes leaves the money which is to alter the fate of all the world to two men : the Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time of his death ; and Sidney Godolphin Alexander Shippard, an Oriel man, until 1877 Attorney-General of Griqualand West, later a judge, then an administrator in a place and at a time very important to Rhodes, and, finally, a director of the Chartered Company. These are the actual legatees.

It was what Rhodes was always doing in his wills : he bequeathed his money to one or two or more individuals, and left it to them to carry out his plans.

It is generally said that Rhodes was a cynic. He did become a cynic : his life made him one. And yet he never lost his natural romantic trustfulness. He was prepared to leave the day’s output of diamonds at de Beers in the unchecked charge of one man merely because he was an Oxford man. His second will reads simply : ‘ I, C. J. Rhodes, being of sound mind, leave my worldly wealth to N. E. Pickering.’ A covering letter adds that the conditions of the will can only be carried out by a trustworthy person, and ‘ I consider you that one.’ ‘ you fully understand,’ he adds in a postscript, ‘ you are to use the interest of the money as you like during your life.

In other words, this young Pickering, one of Rhodes’ clerks, no sort of genius, merely someone Rhodes loved, is to arrange that, by means of Rhodes’ money, the world shall be British. Nothing more !

The human brain is an awesome bit of flesh. Where would one expect the author of such a conception to be working out his destiny ? . . . 1

But not so fast. By the time Rhodes signed this will in’! 1882, he had formed his de Beers Company, entered Parliament, and taken his degree at Oxford. 1

In 1888, the very year he amalgamated all the diamond mines:1 of Kimberley and achieved the Rudd-Rhodes concession over "the territories of Lobengula, he made his third will (young Pickering having died), leaving his estate once more to - friend-again to the same purposes.

In 1891, Chairman now of de Beers and the Consolidated Goldfields, Managing Director of the Chartered Corn-4 pany, Prime Minister of the Cape, he added, in his fourth 1 will, the name of W. T. Stead to that of the previous sole: legatee.

In 1893, the year in which he took Matabeleland from th Matabele, and so consolidated the whole of the territory that was to be named after him, he made his fifth will.

And in 1899, three years after the Jameson Raid and his downfall, in the year that was to mark the beginning, not only of the Boer War, but also of England’s troubles, he made his sixth and last will. And the old dream is still alive.

But its expression is at last that of a man who has discovered, as he said, that Napoleon ‘ re-made boundaries and tried to re-cast the fate of empires yet left France no larger than h found it,’ who knows now the limitation of the human instru- ment, and realizes that even he is such an instrument. It needed the actual evidence that he was not a god to make Rhodes feel this globe called the earth was more than his

35 IV

It will be seen, then, how, by the side of Rhodes’ fantastic broodings ran his concrete performances, how, indeed, they were dependent on one another. Even through the hazes of his first exaltation at Oxford, he saw clearly the material fact of money. He not only, after his lungs became strong enough, kept his terms at Oxford, he also ate his dinners at the Temple (though he was never called), since ( on a calm review of the preceding year I find that E3,ooo has been lost because, owing to my having no profession, I lacked pluck on three occasions, through fearing that one might lose and I had nothing to fall back on in the shape of a profession. . . . I am slightly too cautious now.’ And even while at Oxford he was inviting undergraduates to dinner, and, as one of them reports, making speeches to say that every man ought to have an aim in life, and his own was to work for the British Empire, he was also buying shares in a new railway in Natal, picking up an investment in Hampstead on which he made eight hundred pounds, and calling on secretaries of rival diamond companies and on diamond merchants in Hatton Garden.

Did he, already at that time, want money for nothing but his Imperial schemes ?

Or-‘Philanthropy plus five per cent,’ as, in a moment of frustration, he came to say sneeringly of British policy-did he want a royalty on his imaginings ?

It may be taken that he was human and he did : for many years, and despite all rosy talk, his five per cent and more.

And still, not towards the end. When Rhodes gave his name to a country, and England worshipped him, and the natives he had betrayed called him father, and the young men he had led called him the Old Man-in those days when the bliss of triumph swelled his being until he felt himself, as was afterwards said, the equal of the Almighty, then, despite the Matabele War, his political corruption, his ruthless dealings

36 RHODES with money and men, the Jameson Raid and all that folly Rhodes saw his destiny as something above the gather possessions. . . .

Enthusiasm is inspiring even when it is selfish. It d the mind and deflects the eye of experience. Let Hen and Northcliffe present their creations, and who discern the Ford car and the Daily Mail of fact ? Heaven’s Golden Chariot and the Tables of the Law. is enslaved by the men’s own conception of their achieve

In Rhodes, Spengler sees the Captain of Industry Statesman, a man who ‘ has really ceased to feel his en as his own business, and its aim as the simple property.’Rhodes is actually the example Spengler this enlarged being.

The world worshipped Rhodes and his Idea, and he himself a man heroically dedicated. It came to this, his Idea transcended not only conventional desires, it also beyond the common acceptations of goodness and ho Everything had to yield before it.

In a way, Rhodes was a greater man in the days w seeing the shortness of his time, he cut through caution right and human feeling to reach his goal. But it the Nietzsche-Dostoevsky way. He undid himself-l in the manner, then in the spirit-f Dostoevsky’s Stavro that he might rise above himself.

CHAPTER V THE TREKKING BOERS

I WHAT was this South Africa of Rhodes’ destiny ? What

those people flying before him, dark against a burning sky, and crawling back to kneel to him ? Who these men, called Boers, bearded, sable-clothed in Parliament-loose- seated, straight-legged, in their saddles on the veld ? Who the Englishmen that opposed them ?

It was more than four hundred years since the Portuguese, the adventurers of those times, had found South Africa ; more than two hundred and fifty years since the English had planted in it King James’ flag ; more than two hundred years since the Dutch-absorbing other emigrants from Europe-had settled it, and beaten off and out the little yellow Bushmen and Hottentots ; not so long since those Dutch had come to grips with black men, flowing down the continent, who had in them much Negro, a bit of Hottentot, and some-thing of such people as the Arab, whose name for them was Kaffir-Unbeliever.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Prince of Orange, a fugitive in London, had asked England to guard this African outpost of his-the Cape-from the French

Invader. Eight years later, following the Peace of Amiens, England handed it back. In 1806 she took it again. In 1814, after the Congress of Vienna, she bought it, with some other Dutch settlements, for six million pounds.

There were Dutch settlers who disliked this constant un-settling and they moved away : they did as they had been doing for the last hundred years when they were dissatisfied : there was room enough in Africa : they trekked.

Those more deeply rooted farmed with their slaves until England, as a final hurt, abolished slavery, and, most well-

‘ meaningly, ruined them. Now many of these, too,trekked’

1They complained officially of their losses through the emancipation of slaves, of their fear and hatred of Kaffir marauders of the persons who, ‘ under the cloak of religion,’ cast odium on them. . . . To this day the missionary is to the Boer the; fundamental traitor, the white man who stands for black against white. . . . ‘ We despair,’ said the manifesto, saving the colony from those evils that threaten it.’ And so they trekked.

They called themselves the Voortrekkers: those who go before. This was, indeed, the trek: of treks, the Great Trek. Some trekked north-east mountains they named the Mountains of the Dragon ; bloody battles with the Zulus (there exist still the town Weenen-Weeping, and a Blood River) ; and stayed in N until England told them they were British subjects there no less than at the Cape, when they trekked again, this time towards the Vaal River.

To the lands through which this same Vaal River flowed the other trekkers had meanwhile journeyed. They had arrived at the source of a river which they took to be the River Nile (five hundred miles across Africa by ox-waggon might well seem five thousand) ; they had driven farther north still that Moselikatze, who was to teach Rhodes how a’ conqueror of imagination should rest in death ; they had: settled themselves on both sides of the Vaal, hoping that ate last they were free of England. . . .

But they were not. England knew her children. The, Boers had been, they remained, England’s children. She. claimed her own. The Vaal was crossed and re-crossed in, motherly pursuit. There was talking, fighting, talking, fight- ing-possession, release-at last, weariness. England gave up. On one side of the Vaal there came into being the South African Republic (the Transvaal), on the other the Orange, Free State. Conventions recognized their independence.: Natal, hitherto attached to the Cape, became a separate colony. The Cape received a constitution.

All these things took place in the fifties. A few years before the land of the Kaffirs-Kaflirland or Kaffraria, a region sharing with Cape Colony the foot of South Africa, had become a Crown Colony. There were now three British colonies, and two Boer republics.

Among the Voortrekkers, a boy of ten, journeyed Paul Kruger.

So much for the trekkers. There were now the Boers in the South African Republic, the Boers in the Orange Free State, the Boers who had preferred not to trek and were Cape Colonists. The Boers who had trekked north hated with a deep and contemptuous hate the Kaffirs they had fought against on their terrible journeyings, they hated-respectfully, and not unanimously-the English from whose embrace they had wrenched themselves to experience those terrible journeyings. They developed the virtues of pioneers and lost the civilization of cities.

The Boers who had remained-it follows from their remaining-were suave and not rebellious, they regarded themselves, many of them, as the old families, the aristocrats of the Cape.

They were all of them, those who went and those who stayed, equally earnest and political-minded. Beneath every-thing they felt their common blood.

There were, indeed, some, even in the north, who still wanted to be linked, in their lonely helplessness, with those they had left behind. The Free State had barely achieved its independence when it was craving the intervention of the British against the Basutos, and passing resolutions in favour of a union or alliance with Cape Colony.

The request came at the very time the Governor of the Cape, Sir George Grey, was asking England to take measures ‘ which would permit of the various states and legislatures of the country forming among themselves a federal union.’

meaningly, ruined them. Now many of these, too, trekked They complained officially of their losses through the eplan cipation of slaves, of their fear and hatred of Kaffir marauders of the persons who, ‘ under the cloak of religion,’ cast odium on them. . . . To this day the missionary is to the Boer tb fundamental traitor, the white man who stands for blackl against white. . . . ‘ We despair,’ said the manifesto, ’ a saving the colony from those evils that threaten it.’

And so they trekked. They called themselves the Voor trekkers: those who go before. This was, indeed, the trel of treks, the Great Trek. Some trekked north-east acres mountains they named the Mountains of the Dragon ; fough bloody battles with the Zulus (there exist still the town a Weenen-Weeping, and a Blood River) ; and stayed in Nata until England told them they were British subjects there n less than at the Cape, when they trekked again, this tim towards the Vaal River.

To the lands through which this same Vaal River flowel the other trekkers had meanwhile journeyed. They hat arrived at the source of a river which they took to be th River Nile (five hundred miles across Africa by ox-waggo might well seem five thousand) ; they had driven farthe north still that Moselikatze, who was to teach Rhodes how I conqueror of imagination should rest in death ; they had: settled themselves on both sides of the Vaal, hoping that ate last they were free of England. . . .

But they were not. England knew her children. The, Boers had been, they remained, England’s children. She. claimed her own. The Vaal was crossed and re-crossed in, motherly pursuit. There was talking, fighting, talking, fight- ing-possession, release-at last, weariness. England gave up. On one side of the Vaal there came into being the South African Republic (the Transvaal), on the other the Orange Free State. Conventions recognized their independence.

Natal, hitherto attached to the Cape, became a separate colony. The Cape received a constitution.

THE TREKKING BOERS

Among the Voortrekkers, a boy of ten, journeyed Paul Kruger.

So much for the trekkers. There were now the Boers in the South African Republic, the Boers in the Orange Free State, the Boers who had preferred not to trek and were Cape Colonists. The Boers who had trekked north hated with a deep and contemptuous hate the Kaffirs they had fought against on their terrible journeyings, they hated-respectfully, and not unanimously-the English from whose embrace they had wrenched themselves to experience those terrible journey- ings. They developed the virtues of pioneers and lost the civilization of cities.

The Boers who had remained-it follows from their remaining-were suave and not rebellious, they regarded themselves, many of them, as the old families, the aristocrats of the Cape.

They were all of them, those who went and those who stayed, equally earnest and political-minded. Beneath every-thing they felt their common blood.

40RHODES

Bulwer Lytton, the novelist, was the Colonial Secretary of the day, and he rejected the proposal. His Government, he said, were not prepared to depart from the settled policy of { their predecessors. England, at the moment, did not want to saddle herself with distant, unprofitable lands.$

Thirteen years later she found that at least one piece of 1 Africa was profitable, and she annexed Griqualand West with its diamond fields. In the same year a young Cape Dutchman, Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, revived this talk of union. At the time Rhodes had only just arrived at Kimberley, he was eighteen against Hofmeyr’s twenty-six, he was not ready, for many years, to fight beside Hofmeyr for the cause which, in Hofmeyr’s eyes, he was later to betray.;

In the Transvaal Burgers, once a Dutch Reformed minister -‘ too advanced for his flock and now the Transvaal’s President,; came to speak of himself as ‘ an ardent Federalist.’/ In England the fashion was Disraeli and that Imperialism which had enchanted Rhodes in his Oxford days. There was; an example to South Africa in the federation of Canada. As against the conservatism of Bulwer Lytton, another writer, the historian Froude, had been sent out by the Colonial Office and was going about the country passionately advocating its{ ; union. And though, by the time Froude had done talking, ‘i South Africa was begging to be allowed to mind its own :business, everything seemed to be fairly set for a consummation, generally desired and apparently inevitable, when, in 1877, Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Secretary for Native Affairs in Natal, rode into Pretoria with eight civil servants and twenty-five policemen and annexed the Transvaal.

That, as the saying is to-day, tore it. That did tear the silver cord. The word blood came to be used as it had not hitherto been used between the Dutch of the colonies and the Dutch of the republics. ‘ Do not,’ cried Kruger, ‘ wash your hands in the blood of your brothers.’

It was a story destined to be repeated twenty years later in the Jameson Raid.

Kruger sailed for England to protest against the annexation, and for the Continent to seek intervention.

III

A third writer makes himself heard. Shepstone’s commission had been to annex the Transvaal ‘ if it was desired by the inhabitants, and in his opinion necessary.’ The ubiquitous Trollope was travelling in South Africa. Now, in the Transvaal at exactly the right moment, he comes forward to testify that it was desired by the inhabitants, and highly necessary.

He describes the condition of the country, the rebellious natives, the impotent President, his stiff-necked and ignorant parliament . . . hardly any education, hardly a mail-service, property worthless, no revenue, no order, no obedience, no longer even a fighting spirit.

As for the feeling of the Boers he never, he said, except from Burgers, heard a word of protest, and even Burgers thought that ‘ the wrong done would be of great advantage to everyone concerned.’ ‘ My conviction is,’ says Trollope, ‘ that, had not the English interfered, European supremacy throughout a large portion of South Africa would have been endangered. I think annexation was an imperative duty.’

He goes further. The Boer-s are still, in his view, England’s ‘ migrating subjects ’ who have the right to English government. If England denies this, let her abandon them, and be done with it. It cannot be, he says, now ‘ Rule Britannia ! ’ and now ‘ Economy ! ’ Now ‘ Protect the native ! ’ and now ‘ Let the native look after himself ! ’ He points out that there are, at this date, eleven living Colonial Secretaries, all honourable and deserving well of their country, and as many equally admirable ‘ at peace beyond the troubles of the Native Question.’If only, actuated as they are ‘ by every virtue which should glow within the capacious bosom of a British statesman,’ they knew their own policy ! . . .

Trollope, then, seems to defend Shepstone’s action at least decisive. There is one thing, however, against reasoned conclusion : his premises are wrong. He does no understand the feeling of the Boer, which he finds so meel and acquiescent. Nor did Rhodes understand it when h’ said, many years later, that, for all Shepstone’s impetuosity the *Transvaal would have been happy under British rule not the Imperial Commissioner who now came to take charge of the Transvaal ‘ conducted the business on the lines second-rate line regiment .’ If Rhodes had understood the real feeling of the Boer about the Shepstone annexation, the: Jameson Raid might not have happened. . . .

The temper of the Boer is slow. He says nothing. He does nothing. It is all going, one thinks, very smoothly. . , ., A shock ! His chance comes, and the whole time, one sees. now, he has been remembering. . . .

The fighting spirit Trollope thought dead was no more than sleeping. It had been awakened by outrage and strengthened by resentment. It was gathering itself together. It was rising. There needed, at last, little to spur it to urgent activity when that little came to it-from Scotland.

Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign is still spoken of in SouthAfrica.

When, thirty years after, Gladstone’s son came out to be the first Governor-General of the Union, his name was a hindrance rather than an asset to him.

The Midlothian campaign had one supreme object : to get out Disraeli. To that end Gladstone was prepared to do everything Disraeli was not. If Disraeli wanted to expand the Empire, Gladstone wanted to contract it. If Disraeli was, as Harcourt said, ‘ recklessly pursuing an Asiatic policy,’ Gladstone’s ‘ drenching oratory,’ as Disraeli called that, was to quench it.

43 Shepstone’s annexation was to hand. Gladstone spoke of 6 the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free subjects of a republic to compel them to accept a citizenship which they decline and refuse.’ ‘ If Cyprus and the Transvaal were as valuable as they are valueless,’ he vowed, with that unknowingness of the immediate future which is so ironically pleasing to later generations, ‘ if they were as valuable as they are valueless I would repudiate them because they are obtained by means dishonourable to the character of the country.’

Nothing could so have heartened the arising Boers as this evidence that the Lord, as represented by Mr. Gladstone, was with them. They wrote, hoping he would be victorious in his campaign, and that, ‘ by the mercy of the Lord, the reins of the Imperial Government would be entrusted again to men who look out for the honour and glory of England.’

Their hope was fulfilled. The Lord was merciful. The reins of the Imperial Government were duly entrusted once more to Gladstone. They asked him (Kruger, as he reports in his Memoirs, made the appeal) not to compel them to accept a citizenship which, in the words of the campaign, they declined and refused. Seven thousand Boers-practically the whole electorate-supported Kruger. Gladstone regretted his inability to help the Boers. Inspired by Joseph Chamberlain, he could not, he felt, desert the natives. The annexation might not, he said, be annulled.

On December r6th, 1880, then, on the anniversary of the day even now held sacred to the memory of the victory of the Voortrekkers over the Zulu Dingaan, on this day the Boers proclaimed again their republic. They took up their arms. In February, 1881, they utterly routed a small English force at Majuba and killed the general in command.

Now, at last, Gladstone returned the Boers their indepen-dence. It was a qualified independence, the kind of self-government which, as Kruger expressed it, meant that ‘ first you put your head quietly in the noose so that I can hang you, then you can kick your legs about as much as you please.’

The English were no less dissatisfied. The defeat of Majuba stayed unavenged. Shamed, resentful Englishmen, when they heard of the settlement, dragged their flag through the dust of Pretoria.

Two months after the battle of Majuba Rhodes took his seat for the first time in the Cape Parliament. In 1880 the district of Griqualand West had been added to the Cape, and at the election that followed, and even before getting his pass degree at Oxford, Rhodes had stood as an independent candi-date for the river-digging district of Barkly West, and been elected. He represented Barkly West till he died.

He had not cut a great figure at Oxford. He never took rooms at college. He went little into Oriel. He was no sportsman. He belonged to no important group. And, as to his work, he seldom attended a lecture, was not known to be anything of a student, and was warned against his idleness. He said then that, if he were let alone, he would pull through somehow, and, somehow, he did.

He had at Oxford, as always and everywhere, the habit of discussing exclusively, exhaustively, repetitively, shamelessly, a subject that interested him. He told his friends, a number of whom afterwards became successful men, how things were in Kimberley, what he understood by life, how one mi,--- seek it and experience it in a remote continent.

The anecdotes concerning Rhodes’ time at Oxford are few. The most interesting is that, at a dinner following his initiation as a freemason, he cheerfully, ignoring anguished protests, made a speech revealing the secrets of his craft.

He was, by turn, romantic and cynical. He was a man who sharply took his tone from his surroundings and his associates, but as, beneath it all, he held to a few inviolable principles, this was not recognized.

He came away from Oxford having learnt (I) that Oxford was great, (2) that England was great.

He was a rich man by the time he had his degree. Already, in 1874, he and Rudd had taken in another partner. In his last year the three partners had become six, and they had floated the de Beers Mining Company with a capital of two hundred thousand pounds.

Rhodes entered Parliament still wearing, as he pointed out, his Oxford tweeds. ‘ I think I can legislate in them as well as in sable clothing,’ he said.

Sable clothing was the form in the Cape Parliament of those days. It was what the good old-fashioned English members wore, and certainly what the Dutch wore.

Rhodes’ Oxford tweeds really meant a new way of life in the governing of South Africa.

South Africa was soon to know it.

[CTRL] Rhodes- S G Millin 3

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