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.