trip to South Africa. He offered to go and help in settling the Basuto
trouble. The Cape Government, to its loss and its shame, had not even
the politeness to reply to his offer, but when two millions of money
and a great number of valuable lives had been lost, they asked him a
year later if he would renew his offer, and, like the generous and
single-hearted hero that he was, he did so.
Unhappily, however, when he got on the scene of action he spoilt
everything by allowing the enthusiast in him to get the better of
the soldier and the skilled man of affairs. The Cape Government was
certainly in the wrong as regards the Basuto question. Gordon’s advice
to them was to admit their wrong and begin to do right. Very good
indeed from the ethical point of view, but in practice hopelessly wrong
and bad where the South African native is concerned. With him, as with
the Boers, to admit yourself in the wrong is to own yourself defeated,
and to invite instant aggression.
Of course the Cape Government could do nothing of the sort. To have
done so would have been to have kindled the flames of native war over
the whole southern half of the Continent. This was the fatal policy
which had already lost us the Transvaal when Sir Evelyn Wood had it in
the hollow of his hand. To have repeated it would probably have been
to lose all South Africa. Gordon, in his usual fashion, threw up his
appointment at once and came back to England.
It was now November, 1882. Naturally he was coldly received at home,
but his reception was somewhat mollified by a letter which the King
of the Belgians sent him, for the second time asking him to enter his
service.
“For the moment,” says his Majesty, “I have no mission to offer you,
but I wish to have you at my disposal, and I wish to take you from this
moment as my counsellor. You can name your own terms. You know the
consideration I have for your great qualities.”
The post that he would probably have had was the Governorship of the
Congo. One can imagine how in such a position he would have dealt with
an unhung blackguard like Lothaire, the murderer of a man who had
confided himself to his hospitality.
He spent most of the following year in travel, chiefly in Palestine.
The Delta of Egypt had been conquered, Mohammed Achmet, the carpenter’s
son, had become Mahdi, and the Soudan revolt was in full blast. Now at
last the British Government called upon the one man who, had his genius
and his work been recognised ten years sooner, could have saved so much
disgrace and disaster.
How utterly he had been neglected and how completely he was unknown
in his own country even now, may be guessed from a remark made by a
gentleman to an officer of the Pembroke garrison.
“I see,” said this person, “that the Government have just sent a
Chinaman to the Soudan. What can they mean by sending a native of that
country to such a place?”
He thought, alas, that “Chinese Gordon” was a yellow-faced Asiatic who
wore a pigtail--and yet, after all, did British Officialdom know very
much more about the hero it was now sending to his death?
In Egypt all was panic. The army of Hicks Pasha had been annihilated.
All Gordon’s work was undone, and the Mahdi was practically master of
the Soudan. But meanwhile Gordon had decided to accept the King of
the Belgians’ offer. On New Year’s Day, 1884, he reached Brussels to
tell him so, and the same day he learnt that the British Government
would not let him go. His thoroughly justified answer was a request to
be allowed to retire from Her Majesty’s service, “without any claim
whatever for pension”--King Leopold, with a juster estimate of the
man’s value, having promised to make up the loss to him. The refusal
was withdrawn, and he prepared to start for the Congo.
Then on the 17th of January there came that memorable telegram from
Lord Wolseley asking him to come to London. He knew what he was wanted
for and he went. The work was the pacification and then the evacuation
of the Soudan.
By the 18th of February he was in Khartoum again. His old influence
at once reasserted itself. What followed is too recent and too
well known for detailed repetition here: the vacillation between war
and peace, between diplomacy and force, argument when there should
have been hard-hitting, and hard-hitting when there should have been
argument.
[Illustration: THE LONELY MAN WHO STOOD ON THE RAMPARTS OF KHARTOUM.]
The net result was only fully known to the lonely man who month after
month stood on the ramparts of Khartoum, beleaguered by the Mahdi’s
innumerable hosts, looking out over the desert and down the Nile for
the army of relief which ought even then to have been there, and which
was waiting for politicians to finish their wrangles before it even
started.
Then, week after week, the weary working and waiting went on, the ring
of spears drawing ever closer and closer round the doomed city, the
provisions within rapidly dwindling, and the lonely soldier, the last
of his blood now left in Khartoum, was still looking vainly northward.
So Monday morning, the 26th of January, came, and in the dim light
that comes before the dawn the Arabs made their last and successful
assault. The moon had set at one o’clock. The famished garrison made
but little resistance. Gordon at the head of about a score of men faced
the incoming victors near the church of the Austrian mission.
The eastern sky was just reddening with the coming dawn when a stream
of Arabs, shouting for Islam and victory, rushed into the open space
that had been made round the church. They stopped and put up their
rifles. An irregular volley crackled along their line, and when the
smoke had drifted away there was nothing for the belated expedition to
do but avenge the death of the betrayed and deserted hero.
It was about midday on the 28th when a couple of steamers, with Sir
Charles Wilson and a detachment of the Sussex Regiment on board,
steamed out on to the broad stretch of river above which Khartoum
stands at the junction of the Blue and White Nile. Half-an-hour told
the miserable truth. There was no flag flying from the battlements, and
no English voice to bid the tardy comers welcome.
But there is to be a welcome of a sort, for, as the boats come within
range, the guns of Khartoum open fire on them and a spattering hail of
rifle-balls drop about them, and the puffs of smoke leap up from every
point along the banks till the circle round the boats is completed. Of
this there could be only one meaning: Gordon the deserted was dead.
And this meaning was true, though we did not know the full truth of it
until long after all that was left of him on earth had been scattered,
graveless and uncared for, over the wind-swept sands of the Soudan.
There is his grave; there, too, now is his monument--the memory of the
work he did and the deathless fame he earned. On those who sent him
to the forefront of the battle and left him there to die History has
not yet given her verdict. When she does it will, as usual, be a just
one, and, in all probability, it will not form very pleasant reading
for those of their descendants who may be animated with anything like a
proper pride of ancestry.
XII
_CECIL RHODES_
“_ALL ENGLISH--THAT’S MY DREAM!_”
XII
CECIL RHODES
Although there are obvious difficulties in the way of writing at once
without fear and without favour of a man who is unquestionably one of
the great ones of the earth while he is still alive, there are yet two
very cogent reasons why Cecil Rhodes should be the subject of this
concluding essay.
In the first place, he is the last of our Empire-Makers in order of
time, and, in the second place, he has done his empire-making in the
last region of the earth in which this empire, or any other, can be
extended without coming into direct armed conflict with the great
Powers of the earth.
If you get a map of Africa published thirty years ago, and lay it
beside a quite recent one, a very little intelligent observation
will enable you to see, at any rate, what I may be allowed to call
_prima facie_ evidence of the magnificent work which this last of our
Empire-Makers has done, not so much for this generation, perhaps, as
for the next, and the next.
It is all very well for the goose that has never seen over its own
farmyard wall to assume a lofty, and possibly sincere, contempt for the
vast stretches of prairie and forest land that may lie outside. He is
quite justified in saying to his brother geese: “This is our home; all
our wants are supplied here. What do we want to go and lose ourselves
for in the long grass, or expose ourselves to the wild animals that
may be lurking about the dark depths of the forest? This farmyard
where we have lived all our lives, and where our long and honourable
ancestry has lived before us, is surely enough for us. There is a
nice pond yonder fringed with succulent mud. It has nice worms and
other things in it, and there doesn’t seem any prospect of our general
supply of goose-food coming to an end. What do we care about what there
is outside? Why should we trouble ourselves about the fortunes of
silly birds who go and fly over the wall, and lose themselves in the
wilderness? Let them go. What are they to us, even if they were born in
the same farmyard?”
That is all very well as far as it goes, but there comes a time when
the farmyard fills up, and the duck-pond becomes over-crowded, and
worms and goose-food, &c., have to be scrambled for, and sometimes even
fought for, and it is just here that the larger wisdom of those who not
only look over, but fly over, the farmyard wall comes in.
The fact is, that the known world is fast filling up. It may be that
Nature is preparing some colossal cataclysm for the destruction of this
civilisation, just as she has done for the subversion of others; but,
for the present, what those who have looked over the farmyard wall
have to consider is the fact that vastly improved conditions of life
in the older countries of the world have, with the sole and ominous
exception of France, had their inevitable result in a vast increase of
population, and that meanwhile, for the last three hundred years or so,
the available portions of the world have been getting discovered, and
filled up according to their capacity of sustenance.
It is not, therefore, a merely predatory instinct, or a felonious
desire to go and steal away from the gentle savage those lands which he
is mostly accustomed to use as battlefields, that sends out the pioneer
to the uttermost ends of the earth. It is that ineradicable instinct
planted deep in all healthy human nature to get elbow-room, and behind
this instinct there is the necessity which Providence provided against
when it gave us this instinct, and that is the necessity of getting
out of a place that is overcrowded, into some other where muscles and
brains can get a better chance.
It is probable, too, that that widespread passion which we are
accustomed to call “land-hunger” has been given to us in order to
compel us to carry out the vast scheme of human progress under the
impression that we are benefiting ourselves.
Of course, as a rule, we do benefit ourselves, but it is reserved for
the few to see that greater Purpose which we are fulfilling at the
same time that we are serving ourselves, and of all the men who ever
lived no one has seen this more clearly than Cecil Rhodes. Accident and
weak lungs took him to Africa--that is to say to the only continent in
which it is yet possible for the British Empire to be increased without
violating the territory of some already established and recognised
Power, more or less civilised.
Like Nelson and Warren Hastings, he came of a clerical stock. If it had
not been for those weak lungs of his it is possible that he might have
passed through a distinguished career at Oxford, and either entered the
church, or gone into business--probably the latter--but in either case
the map of South Africa would have looked very different to what it
does to-day.
In one respect he presents a very strong and striking contrast to
our other Empire-Makers. Francis Drake went on his filibustering
expeditions, looted plate-ships, and sacked towns, no doubt with a
worthy intention of hurting the Queen’s enemies, but also with a very
definite idea of making money. John Hawkins started the Slave Trade for
the same reason; so too that East India Company which made it possible
for Clive and Warren Hastings to do their work, was in its beginnings
a money-making concern, and little else. It will be remembered,
for instance, how Warren Hastings was grievously hampered in his
empire-making by the incessant demands of his directors for money.
Now the distinctive fact of Cecil Rhodes’s career is that he started
the other way. The first solid and salient fact that he appears to have
grasped in those old days in the early seventies, when he used to sit
under the burning African sun at a rough deal table picking diamonds
out from the yellow earth as it was brought by his kaffirs from the old
Kimberley mine, was the transcendent and almost irresistible power of
money.
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.