OBITUARIES, FOREIGN. (RHODES.) 



513 



holding the Boer republics and German ambi- 

 tions in check and extending its trade and power 

 northward, which only the imperial Government 

 could do for them, he wrested the leadership of 

 the Afrikander party from Hofmeyr, the advo- 

 cate of a United States of South Africa under its 

 own flag. This he did not accomplish until he 

 had attained brilliant imperial successes that 

 conferred prestige and material advantages upon 

 Cape Colony. The Boer intruders who had seized 

 the trade route in Bechuanaland were ousted by 

 means of a military expedition under Sir Charles 

 Warren, sanctioned by the Gladstone Govern- 

 ment because Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor 

 of the Cape of Good Hope, had adopted the views 

 of Cecil Rhodes. These views of imperial ex- 

 pansion, which expanded themselves into a vision 

 of the whole of the eastern side of Africa from 

 the Cape to Cairo under the British flag, did 

 not imply English rule in South Africa or impe- 

 rial control of the kind that had often exasper- 

 ated the Dutch. He was as earnest an upholder 

 of self-government and in general of the Dutch 

 views of policy in native, educational, fiscal, and 

 other matters as the Bond leaders. The only 

 essential difference between him and Paul Kruger, 

 his great antagonist, was that he wanted to pre- 

 serve the imperial connection, whereas the Trans- 

 vaal President wanted to unite South Africa 

 under republican institutions. Cape Colony was 

 not willing to assume expenses or responsibilities, 

 and the benefits that Rhodes bestowed on the col- 

 ony were obtained at the charge of the Imperial 

 Government or, more frequently, by means of pri- 

 vate funds that were given into his hands for 

 his enterprises, combining commercial speculation 

 with empire building. In the final consolidation 

 of the Kimberley mines, completed in 1887, the 

 trust deed placed large sums at his disposal for 

 political purposes, and other funds were raised 

 among the financial men of London who were 

 delighted with schemes of gain in which possible 

 losses could be charged to patriotism. Cape Col- 

 ony declined to take Bechuanaland at first, but 

 Rhodes made it British, and then proceeded to 

 expand the empire as a private enterprise. The 

 Matabele chief, Lobengula, whose Zulu warriors 

 terrorized all the region between the Transvaal 

 and the Zambesi, was courted both by Boers and 

 Germans and by English agents who furnished 

 him with guns and money in return for equivocal 

 concessions. Rhodes negotiated with him for 

 the right to hunt gold in the territories over 

 which he claimed sway, and in virtue of this 

 concession obtained in 1889 a royal charter con- 

 ferring on the British South Africa Company, 

 which he formed, political and military dominion 

 and a commercial and industrial monopoly in the 

 name of the British Crown over the whole basin 

 of the Zambesi, necessitating a warlike demon- 

 stration against Portugal, who had claimed all 

 this territory for centuries. Cecil Rhodes took 

 the whole management of this extraordinary en- 

 terprise, built a railroad through to Mashona- 

 land, and afterward another from the east coast, 

 endeavored to open the mines, and did attract a 

 community of gold-seekers to the country. When 

 he went to England in 1888 to organize the char- 

 tered company he contributed 10,000 to the 

 funds of the Irish home-rule party. His idea 

 was to weaken, not to strengthen, the central 

 power and the authority of England in the em- 

 pire. He hoped to see separate parliaments in 

 both Ireland and Scotland and an imperial feder- 

 ation in which the self-governing colonies would 

 ich have its proportional representation in the 

 Uperial Parliament. He extended the operations 

 VOL. XLII. 33 A 



of the chartered company beyond the Zambesi 

 up to Lake Tanganyika, subsidized the British 

 colony in Nyasaland, and promised to - build a 

 telegraph-line through the length of Africa in 

 order to dissuade the Imperial Government from 

 abandoning Uganda. When Lobengula, declaring 

 that he had only given the English a right to 

 dig gold, not to rule the country, disputed the 

 authority of the company, Cecil Rhodes organ- 

 ized a military force and in a rapid and ruthless 

 campaign half exterminated the Matabele. With 

 cool courage he went without a guard to Loben- 

 gula's kraal and made peace on his own terms. 

 He became the most conspicuous figure in Cape 

 politics as soon as he had annexed to the British 

 Empire and brought within the political and 

 economical ambit of Anglo-Dutch South Africa 

 territories nearly as great as British India, full 

 of material resources and commercial possibil- 

 ities. He entered into an alliance with Mr. Hof- 

 meyr's Afrikander Bond, and in 1890 took the 

 premiership of Cape Colony, dazzling both the 

 British and the Dutch parties with his brilliant 

 imperialistic schemes, on the strength of which 

 he induced the former to accept the Dutch do- 

 mestic and native policy, the latter to adopt im- 

 perialism. By the act of 1892 the native fran- 

 chise was curtailed. Cecil Rhodes, who man- 

 aged thousands of Kaffirs in the mines and was 

 the originator of the compound system, disbe- 

 lieved in the political and social equality of 

 blacks and whites as thoroughly as any Boer. In 

 1895 the author of the most remarkable political 

 concord that ever existed in South Africa him- 

 self broke the charm and let loose again political 

 rancor and racial jealousy by a sinister, corrupt, 

 and criminal political intrigue as base and dis- 

 honest as was ever conceived by a desperate ad- 

 venturer. He did not concoct the conspiracy 

 alone. Members of the British Cabinet, especially 

 Joseph Chamberlain, were involved in the guilt 

 in a degree that has never been disclosed. Cecil 

 Rhodes, however, was probably the prime mover, 

 and certainly the organizer and director of the 

 conspiracy, and he had to bear the odium, al- 

 though the fiasco in which his plot ended was 

 due to the precipitate action of his agents. After 

 the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 

 1886 and the growth of a mining population in 

 Johannesburg almost as numerous as the Boers 

 in the Transvaal, Rhodes, with the concurrence 

 of his financial partners and friends in Kimberley 

 and London, all of whom were deeply interested 

 with him in the gold-mines that came to surpass 

 the diamond-mines and all other South African 

 industries together, used money freely to work 

 up a British imperialist agitation among the 

 Uitlander population with the view of making it 

 his instrument in changing the Boer republics 

 into British colonies, so as to hasten the realiza- 

 tion of a British South African federation. The 

 Uitlanders had come, not from British lands 

 alone, but from many countries, some of the 

 most influential of them from the United States. 

 The republicans among them were in a large 

 majority, but all desired the full franchise and 

 had common grievances against President Kru- 

 ger's Government. The local jealousy felt at the 

 Cape toward the Transvaal greatly increased 

 when the republican Government had a fiscal 

 control over the main source of wealth in South 

 Africa and built independent lines of railroads to 

 the seaboard. This sentiment began to veer 

 around, however, when the British Government 

 undertook to dictate to the Transvaal about the 

 electoral franchise, schools, and taxation. While 

 the discontent of the Uitlanders was stimulated 



