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.
[Illustration: THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS.]
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.”
I have myself seen “these poor children” happy, healthy, and sober,
in the compounds of Kimberley. In the Transvaal and the Portuguese
territory I have seen them drunken, degraded, and diseased, and I am in
a position to say that every word of the above quotation is solid fact.
I wonder how many of our professional temperance agitators could point
to such a splendid achievement as that.
It seems, perhaps, a good deal to say of Cecil Rhodes that, not only
has he enormously increased our area of empire in South Africa, but
that he is the only man who can efficiently protect that empire from
the two greatest dangers which threaten it.
These are, first, a war of Dutch against British, such as the Pretorian
Government and its German allies have been trying so hard to bring
about, and for the purposes of which they have been arming themselves
to the teeth; and, second, a general native uprising, which would very
probably follow hard on the heels of the racial war.
Now the only English statesman who is thoroughly believed in by the
Dutch majority at the Cape is Cecil Rhodes, and the only white man who
is thoroughly trusted and respected by the natives of all tribes is
also Cecil Rhodes, and this is a fact which goes very far to account
for the desperate anxiety of the Hollander-German-Boer party in South
Africa and Europe to get him thoroughly disgraced and discredited over
the Jameson fiasco.
The measure of their failure is not only the measure of his triumph. It
is also the measure of the future peace and prosperity of British South
Africa. We live too near the man to see him in his just proportions,
but, unless Downing Street excels, if that be possible, its own
blunders in the past, and unless this royal race of ours suddenly
belies all its best traditions, a day must come when the British flag
will fly over a federated and united South Africa, when the rule of the
Boer will have gone the way of all anachronisms--and in that day men
will look back and see, in juster perspective than we can do, the great
qualities of the man who has made it all possible.
It is probable that in that day the very names of his enemies and
detractors will be forgotten, or remembered only as we remember the
name of Cataline in connection with that of Cicero. Then Cecil Rhodes
will take his place beside Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and in
some great square of the future Metropolis of the British African
Empire, there will stand a statue of him, and on its base will probably
be inscribed those memorable words of his:--
“All English: That’s my dream!”
And with such words I, too, may fittingly bring to a close this all too
imperfect series of word-portraits of some, at least, of the Men Who
Have Made the Empire.
UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors, including occasional missing letters and
punctuation at the ends of some lines, were corrected; unpaired
quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and
otherwise left unpaired.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations.
Page 8: “Oune” probably is a misprint for “Orne”.
Page 204: “Sir Thomas Wren” should be “Sir Christopher Wren”.
Page 261: “countymen” may be a misprint for “countrymen”.
Page 268: “Dafour” was printed that way.