Cecil Rhodes

“ implicitly believe will result from the union of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world and to encourage in the students from the United States of North America who will benefit from the American Scholarships to be established for the reason above given at the University of Oxford under this my Will an attachment to the country from which they have sprung but without ”

“ Rhodes had not forgiven him for the upsetting of his apple-cart. But Mr. Rhodes was not a man who wore his heart upon his sleeve. He schooled himself to repress manifestations of affection, but an incident for which Lord Grey is my authority shows how unfounded were Dr. Jameson’s misgivings. If Mr. Rhodes loved anything in the world, he loved his house, and Groote Schuur was the nest which he had built for himself in the shadow of Table Mountain, which he had filled with all manner of historic and literary treasures. ”

“ Among all the agencies for the shaping of the future of the human race none seem so potent now and still more hereafter as the English-speaking man. Already he begins to dominate the world. The Empire and the Republic comprise within their limits almost all the territory that remains empty for the overflow of the world. Their citizens, with all their faults, are leading the van of civilisation, and if any great improvements are to be made in the condition of mankind, they will necessarily be leading instruments in the work. ”

“ What is the distinctive feature of that doctrine? The perfection of the species, attained by the elimination of the unfit; the favourable handicapping of the fit. The most capable species survives, the least capable goes to the wall. The perfecting of the fittest species among the animals, or of races among men, and then the conferring upon the perfected species or race the title-deeds of the future; that seemed to Mr. Rhodes, through his Darwinian spectacles, the way in which God is governing His world, has governed it, and will continue to govern it, so far as we can foresee the future. ”

“ Rhodes is no more with us may seem to some a conclusive reason why all hope should be abandoned of realising his great idea. To me it seems that the death of the Founder in the midst of his unaccomplished labours is a trumpet call to all those who believed in him to redouble their exertions to carry out his vast designs for the achievement of the unity of the English-speaking race.
What is the Rhodesian ideal? It is the promotion of racial unity on the basis of the principles embodied in the American Constitution. The question of differential tariff is a matter of detail. ”

“ John’s, Bulawayo, last autumn, he said:—‘In England a Board school is not bound to have any religion. I think it is a mistake, just as I think it is a mistake in Australia that they have excluded history and religion from their schools. I think it is an absolute mistake, because, after all, the child at school is at that period of its life when it is most pliable to thoughts, and if you remove from it all thought of religion I do not think you make it a better human being. ”

“ My dear Schnadhorst,—I enclose you a cheque for £5,000, and I hope you will, with the extreme caution that is necessary, help in guiding your party to consider politics other than England.
I do not think your visit to Kimberley did you harm, either physically or politically, and I am glad to send you the contribution I promised. The future of England must be Liberal, perhaps, to fight Socialism. ”

“ Outside England none of our politicians, statesmen, or administrators impressed the imagination of the world half as deeply as Cecil Rhodes. For good or for evil he ranked among the dozen foremost men of his day. He was one of the few men neither royal nor noble by birth who rose by sheer force of character and will to real, although not to titular, Imperial rank. After the Pope, the Kaiser, the Tsar, there were few contemporary statesmen who commanded as much attention, who roused as much interest, as the man who has passed from our midst while still in his prime. ”

“ Rhodes mostly sat, and the little formal garden, the view leads up to a grassy slope and over woodland away to the crest of the buttressed peak and the great purple precipices of Table Mountain. Through the open park land and wild wood koodoos, gnus, elands, and other African animals wander at will. Only the savage beasts are confined in enclosures. No place of the kind is so freely, so recklessly shared with the public. ”

“ Once every year “Founder’s Day” will be celebrated at Oxford; and not at Oxford only, but wherever on the broad world’s surface half-a-dozen old “Rhodes scholars” come together they will celebrate the great ideal of Cecil Rhodes—the first of modern statesmen to grasp the sublime conception of the essential unity of the race. Thirty years hereafter there will be between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each one of whom will have had impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder. ”

“ As Gordon never went anywhere without his little pocket edition of Thomas à Kempis, so Rhodes never left behind him his pocket edition of Marcus Aurelius. His copy was dog-eared and scored with pencil marks, showing how constantly he had used it. But he never quite attained to the serene philosophy of the Imperial philosopher. He shrank from death, not so much from the fear of anything after death, but because it was the arrest of activity, the cessation of the strenuous life which he had always lived. He was ever a doer. ”

“ The next risk with a commercial company like ours would be the question of the cost of administration. You might very fairly say, ‘We know that the future is all right. We feel that so huge a country, mineralised like that, must come out successfully; but what is the cost of administration, what is the difference between revenue and expenditure?’ That is the next question which business men would ask. In connection with that you will no doubt have examined the reports, but it is always very difficult to obtain a practical idea from a report, respecting a question like this. ”

“ Rhodes was drawn to his last resting-place. The coffin was lowered into the tomb, the mourners, white and black, filed past the grave, and then a huge block of granite, weighing over three tons, sealed the mouth of the sepulchre from all mortal eyes. There, on the Matoppos, lies the body of Cecil Rhodes; but who can say what far regions of the earth have not felt, and will not hereafter feel, a thrill and inspiration of the mind which for less than fifty years sojourned in that tabernacle of clay? ”

“ You might finish the war by union with America and universal peace, I mean after one hundred years, and a secret society organised like Loyola’s, supported by the accumulated wealth of those whose aspiration is a desire to do something, and a hideous annoyance created by the difficult question daily placed before their minds as to which of their incompetent relations they should leave their wealth to. ”

“ To establish a periodical circulating throughout the English-speaking world, with its affiliates or associates in every town, and its correspondents in every village, read as men used to read their Bibles, not to waste an idle hour, but to discover the will of God and their duty to man, whose staff and readers alike are bound together by a common faith and a readiness to do common service for a common end—that, indeed, is an object for which it is worth while to make some sacrifice. ”

“ What is wanted is a revival of civic faith, a quickening of spiritual life in the political sphere, the inspiring of men and women with the conception of what may be done towards the salvation of the world, if they will but bring to bear upon public affairs the same spirit of self-sacrificing labour that so many thousands manifest in the ordinary drudgery of parochial and evangelistic work. ”

“ I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to this, the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars.” He then asks himself what are the objects for which he should work, and answers his question as follows: “The furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. ”

“ If the report of such a condition in the settlement by Sir Charles Warren is correct, that no man of Dutch descent is to have a farm, it would be better for the English colonists to retire. I remember, when a youngster, reading in my English history of the supremacy of my country and its annexations, and that there were two cardinal axioms—that the word of the nation when once pledged was never broken, and that when a man accepted the citizenship of the British Empire there was no distinction between races. ”

“ The only chance for a colony is to stop these ideas before they develop, and taking this new country of ours, I thought it would be a wise thing to put in the constitution that the tariff should not exceed the present Cape tariff, which is a revenue and not a protective tariff. (Cheers.) The proof of that is that we have not a single factory in the Cape Colony. I thought if we made that a part of our constitution in the interior, we should stop the creation of vested factories, a most unfair treatment of British trade, and a most unjust thing to the people of a new country. ”

“ His intense and genuine love of the big and beautiful in natural scenery prompted him to buy as much as he could of the forest slopes of Table Mountain, so that it might be saved for ever from the hands of the builder, and the people, attracted to it by gardens, wild animals, and stately architecture, might be educated and ennobled by the contemplation of what he thought one of the finest views in the world. ”

“ I will challenge any man or any woman, however broad their ideas may be, who object to go to church or chapel, to say they would not sometimes be better for an hour or an hour and a half in church. I believe they would get there some ideas conveyed to them that would make them better human beings. There are those who, throughout the world, have set themselves the task of elevating their fellow-beings, and have abandoned personal ambition, the accumulation of wealth, perhaps the pursuit of art, and many of those things that are deemed most valuable. ”

“ Fancy the charm to young America, just coming on and dissatisfied—for they have filled up their own country and do not know what to tackle next—to share in a scheme to take the government of the whole world! Their present president is dimly seeing it, but his horizon is limited to the New World north and south, and so he would intrigue in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, to the exclusion of England. Such a brain wants but little to see the true solution ”

“ Even a Labouchere who possesses no sentiment should be taught that the labour of England is dependent on the outside world, and that as far as I can see the outside world, if he does not look out, will boycott the results of English labour. ”

“ No man had less sympathy with the high-flying Imperialists of Downing Street than had Mr. Rhodes. No man more utterly detested the favourite maxims of military satraps and Crown Governors. When he came home from the siege of Kimberley he told me that he expected “in two years’ time to be the best abused man in South Africa by the Loyalists.” “I am delighted to hear it,” I replied; “but how will that come about?” “Because,” he said, “these people have set their minds upon trampling on the Dutch, and I am not going to allow it. ”

“ It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, and as each seizes on the idea, for that he more or less works for the rest of his existence. ”

“ I can see very clearly that the whole of your politics lie in your trade, or should do so, because you are not like France, producing wine—you are not like the United States, a world by itself—you are a small province, doing nothing but making up the raw material into the manufactured article, and distributing over the world, and your great policy should be to keep the trade of the world, and therefore you have done a wise thing in remaining in Egypt and taking Uganda. ”

“ With (some such) safeguards—and they must be effective safeguards for the maintenance of Imperial unity—I am of the opinion that the Home Rule granted should be a reality, and not a sham.
If the Irish are to be conciliated and benefited by the grant of self-government, they should be trusted, and trusted entirely. Otherwise the application of popular institutions to Ireland must be deemed impracticable, and the only alternative is the administration of the country as a Crown colony, which plan in the present state of public opinion is totally impossible. ”

“ But this great gain was obtained, that supposing that the charter passed into self-government, and a wave of Protection came over the territory, and they pass, we will say, a duty of 50 per cent. on British goods, that would be disallowed, because it was contrary to the constitution. The only objection that has ever been made to this proposition is that it would have been law as long as it was no good, and when it was any good it would have been done away with. That shows a want of knowledge again. People think the people in the colonies are all for Protection. It is nothing of the kind. ”

“ Rhodes never varied.
“I have my own views as to the future of South Africa, and I believe in an United States of South Africa, but as a portion of the British Empire. I believe that confederated states in a colony under responsible government would each be practically an independent republic; but I think we should have all the privileges of the tie with the Empire. Possibly there is not a very great divergence between myself and the honourable member for Stellenbosch, excepting always the question of the flag.” ”

“ Were such a church founded it would be as a great voice sounding out over sea and land the summons to all men to think seriously and soberly of the public life in which they are called to fill a part. ”

“ What an awful thought it is that if we had not lost America, or if even now we could arrange with the present members of the United States Assembly and our House of Commons, the peace of the world is secured for all eternity! We could hold your federal parliament five years at Washington and five at London. The only thing feasible to carry this idea out is a secret one (society) gradually absorbing the wealth of the world to be devoted to such an object. There is Hirsch with twenty millions, very soon to cross the unknown border, and struggling in the dark to know what to do with his money ”