Part 16

In Drake’s day valour and endurance were used to earn money in the first case, or, if the reader prefers it, to steal money or its equivalent. This was well enough in its way, and the British Empire would have got on rather badly without it, but Cecil Rhodes appears to have had an inspiration on this subject of the sort which only comes to men of real genius. He seems to have said to himself: “How would it be to earn the money first in thousands, in hundreds of thousands, in millions if possible, and then use it to employ in more legitimate work the same valour and enthusiasm which are just as conspicuous British qualities now as they were in the days of Queen Elizabeth?”

It is quite possible that, being an Oxford undergraduate, he remembered the famous aphorism of Horace: “Honestly if possible--but still make it.” There may have been some of his transactions which if submitted to the legal scrutiny, say, of the Lord Chief Justice, would possibly move him to another exhibition of that “unctuous rectitude” such as that with which he, the sometime forensic defender of traitors and sedition-mongers, outpoured on Dr. Jameson and his comrades.

I have heard stories of the sort myself in Kimberley and elsewhere in South Africa, but what of that? There are a good many things in our history that it would be difficult to defend on moral grounds, and yet without them we should have little or no history at all.

There are several of Cecil Rhodes’s own sayings on record which show clearly the light in which he looked upon large quantities of money not merely as money, not as vulgar riches, but as an indispensable means to an exalted end.

He was with Gordon in that sadly futile expedition of his to Basutoland, and during one of their conversations Gordon told him how he had been offered a roomful of gold as a reward for his services in China.

“And you mean to say you didn’t take it?” said Rhodes, possibly with some doubt of the great Crusader’s sanity in his mind.

“No, I didn’t,” said Gordon. “I didn’t feel altogether justified in doing so. I had been paid already for what I’d done.”

“I should have taken it, and as many more roomfuls as they would have given me,” said Rhodes, without hesitation. “Just think how much more you could have done with it. It’s no use for us to have big ideas if we have not got the money to carry them out.”

That was Cecil Rhodes. He didn’t say: “Think how much it would have come to,” or “How rich a man it would have made you,” or even “What you would have been able to buy with it,” but “What you could _do_ with it.” Those who call Cecil Rhodes a money-grabber, a financial schemer, and all the rest of it, might learn something from that conversation were they not as they are.

There is no doubt but that he first of all devoted himself body and soul to the making of money, and yet in the meanwhile he must have been slowly shaping this Ideal of his. Early in the eighties he was talking about South Africa generally with a friend, and during the course of the conversation he pointed to the map and said: “There! All English! That’s my dream.” And all English it would have been if it had not been for the stupidity, the ignorance, and the cowardice of the vote-hunters in Downing Street, who were afraid to be worried with the cares, though they had no objection to avail themselves of the honours and profits of empire-making.

It is a favourite theory of my own that no man ought to be allowed to sit either in the House of Lords or the House of Commons unless he has been at least once round the world and visited the greater part of the British Empire.

If this had been the rule during the present reign, I am perfectly certain that, whether by purchase, conquest, or colonisation, the whole of Africa from the Zambesi to the Cape would now be coloured red, and there would probably have been a red streak stretching from Cairo _viâ_ Khartoum to the shores of Lake Tanganyka.

In one of his speeches, Cecil Rhodes aptly described South Africa as the Cinderella of the British Colonies, and this is perfectly true. There is hardly a single instance in which Downing Street has not tried to lose what every one now recognises as of almost priceless importance.

Thus, for instance, in 1872 Lord Kimberley might have bought Delagoa Bay, “the keyhole of Africa,” for the paltry amount of twelve or fifteen thousand pounds and he refused the bargain. It would be cheap now at ten millions. Unfortunately, as his biographer aptly puts it, there was no Cecil Rhodes then to find the money out of his own pocket. He was still sitting on a bucket and sorting diamonds in Kimberley.

Again, in 1875, the Cape Colonial Government strongly urged the annexation of Walfisch Bay and Damaraland on the south-west coast. The reply of Downing Street was: “Her Majesty can give no encouragement to schemes for the retention of British jurisdiction over Great Namaqualand and Damaraland.”

This, by the way, is a somewhat important point to those who wish to get a clear view of Cecil Rhodes’s work as an Empire-Maker in South Africa. Twenty-two years ago Ernst von Weber, who had been prospecting, as it were, for a German South African Empire, said: “What would not such a country full of such inexhaustible natural treasures become if in course of time it is filled with German emigrants! Besides all its own natural and subterraneous treasures, the Transvaal offers to the European Power which possesses it an easy access to the immensely rich tracts of country which lie between the Limpopo and the Central African lakes and the Congo.”

In 1884 Prince Bismarck said before a committee of the Reichstag: “No opposition is apprehended from the British Government, and the machinations of the Colonial authorities must be prevented.”

Now look at any modern map of South Africa. Damaraland is now German territory, the Transvaal has been given back to the corrupt and tyrannical government which has of late made itself a libel on the name of civilisation. A German railway runs from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay, the only road from the sea to the Transvaal which does not pass through British territory. There is a regular line of German steamers to Delagoa Bay, and through this channel have come in the German officers who have drilled the Transvaal army and built the forts which command Johannesburg and Pretoria, as well as the field-pieces and machine-guns, the thousands of rifles and the millions of cartridges, which have no other purpose than the oppression of British subjects and the slaughter of British soldiers as soon as the psychological moment arrives.

This much for the present has been lost, and unhappily no one has been hung for the losing of it. Some day it will have to be taken back, probably at a frightful loss of life and an enormous expenditure of money.

But there is one bright spot in the picture. Between the German territory of Damaraland and the western frontier of the Transvaal and the Free State there is a broad stretch of red. It was only painted red just in the nick of time, and it was Cecil Rhodes who painted it.

Another glance at the map will convince you in a moment what would have happened if he had not made Bechuanaland British. To the east there is the ignorantly hostile Transvaal. Behind that and stretching far away to the northward is the Portuguese territory of Mozambique. Farther north are the southern confines of the Soudan, and the enormous virgin lands of Central Africa. To the west is German West Africa. Hence, but for that red strip, there would be no way either by sea or land through British territory--that is to say, through no territory that would not be hostile--to the Central African Empire of the future, most of which is, thanks to Cecil Rhodes, already called Rhodesia.

People who only read the English papers, some of which would appear, like the Pretoria _Press_ and the _Standard and Diggers News_, to be in the pay of Mr. President Krüger and his corrupt legislature, have an idea, and a very natural one too, that the great company known as the De Beers Consolidated Mines is just a money-making concern and nothing else. There never was a greater mistake. The De Beers Company is the creation of Cecil Rhodes, and therefore it had to be an empire-making concern one way or the other.

One night there was a conversation between three men in Kimberley, which deserves to become historical. The three men were Alfred Beit, Barnie Isaacs Barnato, and Cecil John Rhodes. Each of these three men had something that the others wanted. Beit and Barnato don’t seem to have wanted much more than good business, but Alfred Beit already knew Cecil Rhodes for something much greater and better than merely a business man and piler-up of money-bags, so he supported them.

What Rhodes wanted was nothing less than the levying of a subsidy on the diamond mining industry of Kimberley, for the purpose of empire-making in the north. Barnie Barnato kicked at this. In the end he gave way, as he always did to Rhodes, and the result was that the De Beers Corporation was virtually taxed to the extent of half a million sterling for that northward expansion which Cecil Rhodes made possible when he persuaded Sir Hercules Robinson to proclaim the Bechuanaland Protectorate and checkmated the Germans on the west and the Boers on the east just as they were going to join hands across it.

What they really meant to do may be easily inferred from Van Niekerk’s raid into the so-called Stella-Land which necessitated Sir Charles Warren’s expedition--for which the Pretorian Government still owes us about a million and a half--and Colonel Ferreira’s attempted raid across the Limpopo into Matabeleland which was only stopped by Dr. Jameson’s Maxims.

If it had not been for Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers half million, the British flag would not now be flying over a region as large as France and Germany combined which, by all appearances, is destined to be the nucleus of the South African Empire of the day after to-morrow.

In such a vast country as South Africa--how big it is may be guessed from the comparison between it and England on the map--the first requisite for advancing civilisation is a road, the next a telegraph, and the next is a railway, and the absolute necessity of these to the new domain that he was making for Britain was of course plainly apparent to such a man as Cecil Rhodes.

His dream, which, if he lives long enough, he will certainly realise, is the making of that British high road from Cairo to Cape Town which Gordon, but for the baseness which betrayed him to his death, would certainly now be helping to make from the other end. Therefore when there was a shortness of money for the making of the railway to Mafeking, and for carrying the telegraph up through Rhodesia and northward across the Zambesi, the deficiency was supplied out of the capacious pockets of the man who, if he had only had the chance, would have been so glad to give that £12,000 for Delagoa Bay, and who knows Africa well enough to see that with its rinderpest, its locusts, and its horse-sickness, it stands in more need of mechanical transit and communication than any other part of the world.

When the extension of the Beira railway became necessary Cecil Rhodes, by the sheer force of his own character, persuaded Lord Rothschild to put down £25,000, every penny of which the great financier believed was going to be “chucked into the sea.” His Lordship probably thinks differently now.

Perhaps the most salient feature in the contemporary history of South Africa is the silent but ceaseless struggle for mastery which is going on, and has been going on for years, between Cecil Rhodes and Paul Krüger.

There are some people who say that there are only two men in South Africa. In the political sense this is probably true. So far, with the single exception, perhaps, of the Jameson Raid and the consequences which the weakness of our officials abroad and the cowardice of our government at home made so deplorable, the enlightened Englishman has scored at every move over the dishonest cunning of the ignorant Dopper.

He prevented him joining hands with the Germans across Bechuanaland, he stopped his raid into Matabeleland, he got his raiders stopped on the confines of Amatongaland--and so destroyed his cherished dream of a Transvaal seaboard--and, worse than all, he has made Rhodesia a so much better place even for Dutchmen to live in than the Transvaal, that the Boers are every day treking through the drifts of the Limpopo to live on British soil and under British rule--that of Paul Krüger and his German and Hollander hangers-on becoming impossible for self-respecting men to submit to just as fast as their avarice and stupidity can make it so.

Both these men have their dreams. Paul Krüger is not the sort of person whom any one would associate with an ideal. Still he has got one. It is a United States of South Africa, under what he is pleased to consider republican rule.

He is probably too ignorant to know that, with the possible exceptions of Russia and Turkey, there never was a civilised or half-civilised Government less like a republic than the corrupt and tyrannical oligarchy of Pretoria, but that’s what he means, and it is to fight for that and not to fight for the independence of the Transvaal, which he knows perfectly well is secured by the Imperial Government, that he has built his forts and imported his German officers, German cannon, and German rifles and ammunition.

Cecil Rhodes also has an ideal. It is a federation of the South African states, crown colony, republic and self-governing colony, each possessing the management of its own affairs, and directing them according to the will of the majority, and all united under the ægis of the British flag, and enjoying that equal freedom and security which cause nineteen out of every twenty emigrants from France and Germany to go and settle in British colonies rather than in their own.

Which of the two ideals will be realised is not very difficult to see. The one is artificial, unnatural, and two hundred years behind the times. The other is natural, logical, and if anything, a little bit ahead of the times, and the difference between them is not altogether unlike the difference between Paul Krüger and Cecil Rhodes.

It would, of course, be quite outside the range of human possibility for a man to have attained to the real greatness of Cecil Rhodes without having made a good many enemies, public and private.

Of his private enemies there is no need to say very much. In the first place, until human nature has changed very considerably, it would be quite impossible for any man to have been so uniformly and so brilliantly successful as Cecil Rhodes has been without making plenty of enemies both private and public. One of the very worst methods of promoting brotherly love in the breasts of men whose standard of manliness is not quite up to the average is to out-distance them in the race for political distinction, or to out-wit them in the trickery of finance--and I don’t suppose that any one would be readier to admit that, in its ultimate analysis, finance is mainly trickery than Cecil Rhodes himself.

This category would include practically all the private and personal enemies of Cecil Rhodes save one. The exception is, I regret to say, a woman, and that is a fact which naturally blunts the pen of criticism when it is held in the hands of a man. There would be no need to mention Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner--better known in literary circles as Olive Schreiner--here but for the fact that she has made it impossible to pass her over without notice by writing the most recent and, I fear I must also say, the most virulent and untruthful attack that has been made upon the personal character and public policy of our South African Empire-Maker.

And yet even this attack is in its way a sort of testimonial to the greatness of the man whose reputation it was intended to demolish, despite the fact that in it Cecil Rhodes is depicted as a monster of iniquity and as the head of a soulless and tyrannical corporation which has not only been guilty of all the crimes in the Decalogue, but has invented a few new ones to go on with. Strange to say, however, when Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner was once interrupted in one of her well-known denunciations of the greatest Englishman of his day with the remark that after all he was a great man, she exclaimed: “A great man! Of course he is, a very great man, and that’s the pity of it!” The almost unanimous verdict of the English and South African press on the deplorable literary and political blunder which Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner perpetrated in writing “Trooper Peter Halkett,” goes far to show that her personal estimate of her enemy is a good deal more correct than her literary and political estimate.

Of the public enemies of Cecil Rhodes it will suffice to point out briefly that, without one exception and whatever their nationality, they are also the enemies of his country. It is noteworthy too that Cecil Rhodes himself seems to have an instinctive perception of real as distinguished from apparent or merely superficial hostility to the British Empire.

He recognised long ago, for instance, that our most dangerous enemies both at home and abroad are the Germans, and throughout his whole career he has lost no opportunity of checking and checkmating, so far as the cowardice and apathy of the Colonial Office has permitted him, their innumerable and dishonest attempts to undermine the British supremacy in South Africa.

If I were asked to name the three men who hate him most bitterly I think I should say Paul Krüger, Dr. W. J. Leyds and the German Emperor. It is something more than a coincidence that these three men should also be the bitterest and most determined enemies of the British Empire.

There can hardly be any doubt now in the minds of well-informed people that the conditions which provoked the pitiful attempt at revolution in Johannesburg and led up to the Jameson Raid were made in Germany, or at any rate by German hands. The whole thing was what may be described with more force than elegance as “a put up job.”

The idea was to goad the Outlanders to revolt, put the rebellion down by armed force, assert the absolute independence of the Transvaal as a consequence, and get rid of that awkward clause in the Convention of 1884 which asserts the suzerainty of Great Britain over the Transvaal by compelling the Pretorian government to submit all its foreign treaties to the supervision of the Colonial Office.

The next step would have been an offensive and defensive alliance with Germany, and then, if there had been no Special Squadrons or obstacles of that sort in the way, the Transvaal would have been gradually Germanised.

It was this that Cecil Rhodes foresaw when he ordered Dr. Jameson to mass his men on the Transvaal frontier. This was, in fact, his answer to the German application to the Portuguese Government for permission to land sailors and marines from the _See-Adler_ in Delagoa Bay with a view to sending them up to Pretoria in violation of the most explicit treaty obligations.

It is quite plain now that Cecil Rhodes intended this force as a practical hint, and not as an invading army. I remember one night shortly after the Raid, I was smoking the pipe of peace with some of the Transvaal officials on the stoep of President Krüger’s house in Pretoria. We were discussing Cecil Rhodes’s complicity in the Raid, and in answer to a suggestion that he was at the bottom of it all, I said: “No doubt Rhodes knew all about it. I needn’t tell you gentlemen that nothing happens in South Africa that he doesn’t know, but he never meant Jameson to cross the frontier when he did. If he had meant invasion he would have had the country by now, but you won’t convince me that Cecil Rhodes is such a fool as to try and jump the Transvaal with five hundred men.”

The only answer to this was a general laugh. President Krüger is not supposed to understand English, but he laughed too.

Of Cecil Rhodes’s enemies at home it is so difficult to speak with anything like patience that they had better be passed over as briefly as possible. The unceasing hostility of a certain section of the British Press may, to some extent, be accounted for by the fact that he has many powerful financial rivals, and that the Transvaal Government has almost unique opportunities for bribery.

Few newspapers are quite incorruptible. They are primarily run to pay, and, therefore, it is hardly to be expected that they should be entirely proof against the manifold seductions which an individual millionaire, or a government with a vast secret service fund, is able to practise upon them.

It is almost impossible to believe that their hostility is really sincere. They know perfectly well that empire-making cannot be done with kid gloves on. They know, also, that the amount of actual good that Cecil Rhodes has done in South Africa, even apart from empire-making, is almost incalculable. None know this better than the loyal Dutch burghers of the Cape and the Kaffirs. The former call him “the Englishman with the Afrikander heart”; the latter call him their father. But for him there would probably not be many loyal Dutch at all at the Cape; and but for him also Matabeleland and Mashonaland would still be the happy hunting-ground of King Lobengula’s murdering, ravaging, and slave-making impis.

He is, in fact, as was plainly shown in that historic Indaba in the Matoppos, the one white man in South Africa whom the natives love and trust. It is not many men who, with millions enough to buy everything that the world has to sell in the way of comfort and luxury and honours--as distinguished from honour--who would have gone as he did, armed only with a walking-stick, into the stronghold of the Matabele, and there won from them the title of “the bull that separates the fighting bulls,”--in other words, the peacemaker--and stopped a war which, if the Imperial authorities had had their way, would have gone on into the next year, and would have cost four or five millions at least.

It is, by the way, characteristic of the strength of mind and fixity of purpose of this man, that he solemnly warned Sir Richard Martin that, if, after this, the war was continued, he would himself go and live among the Matabele, and wash his hands of the whole affair.

It is noteworthy, too, that this man, whom Olive Schreiner describes by the mouth of her impossible trooper as “death on niggers,” is, in the opinion of the niggers themselves, the greatest friend they ever had.

If all the work of all the societies and associations of amiable old ladies of both sexes for the Protection of the Aborigines and the Elevation of the Savage were put together, it would not amount to a tithe of what Cecil Rhodes has done for the natives of South Africa. The Glen-Grey Act alone has almost emptied the prisons of kaffir offenders, and as for his work at Kimberley, the effects of which I have myself seen, it would be difficult to speak too highly of it.

Thus, for instance, it is not generally known that Cecil Rhodes is the greatest practical temperance worker in the world. Every one knows that the curse of all savage races in contact with civilised peoples is liquor. When he was moving the second reading of the Glen-Grey Act he said:

“I know the curse of liquor. Personally at the Diamond Fields I have assisted in making ten thousand of these poor children hard-working and sober. They are now in compounds, healthy and happy. In their former condition the place was a hell upon earth, therefore my heart is thoroughly with the idea of removing liquor from the natives.”