Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

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?”