1906-7. TRANSACTIONS. 63 



purposely threw the French into a frenzy, and deliberately pre- 

 cipitated the war which deluged their land with blood. His 

 excuse was the danger of his country (h). 



Machiavelli said of the unscrupulous scoundrel C«sar Borgia : 

 " He therefore who thinks it necessary * * * to secure 

 himself against his enemies; to gain himself friends; to overcome 

 whether by force or fraud; to make himself beloved or feared by 

 his people; * * * to destroy and exterminate such as would 

 do him injury * * * to manage himself so in his alliances 

 with Kings and princes that all of them should either be obliged 

 to requite him or be afraid to offend him; he, I say, cannot find 

 a fresher or better model than the actions of this prince. ' ' 



And the same may be said of Bismarck; and yet the"" Pope 

 himself, after having acted as mediator between Spain and Ger- 

 many, conferred the Order of Christ upon Bismarck, referring to 

 him as Excelso viro, magno cancellaris; and this although Bis- 

 marck's May laws were still in force (d) . 



Rhodes. — In Great Britain no man of recent notability has 

 been more widely and loudly acclaimed than Cecil Rhodes. And 

 a great man, and great Empire-builder (Geography-grabber, our 

 foolish rivals call him) he undoubtedly was. But his political 

 morality was not a whit better than that of Napoleon or Bismarck. 



The Jameson raid, which he organized, was of course nothing 

 but ^a marauding, buccaneering invasion of friendly territory; 

 but to my mind the principal disgrace attaching to that event is 

 not so much the fact that he was guilty of murder (for which he 

 was never punished), but that he published to the world, as 

 justification for the raid, a concocted letter from the Uitlanders of 

 Johannesburg, imploring Jameson at once to come to their relief — 

 a letter which had been written several weeks before, with the 

 date left blank so that it might be filled up when Jam^eson was 

 ready. The attitude of Britain towards this outrageous defiance- 

 of law and decent neighborhood was frankly Machiavellian ; and 

 the general feeling was well reflected in contemporary verse : — 



"Wrong, is it wrong? well, may be; 

 But I'm going boys, all the same. 

 Do they think me a burgher's baby 

 To be scared by a scolding name? 



(6) Mallenson's "Refounding of the German Empire," 219, 220. 

 id) Contemp. Rev., Dec, 1902, p. 789. 



