Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

People who only read the English papers, some of which would appear, like the Pretoria Press and the Standard and Diggers News, to be in the pay of Mr. President Krüger and his corrupt legislature, have an idea, and a very natural one too, that the great company known as the De Beers Consolidated Mines is just a money-making concern and nothing else. There never was a greater mistake. The De Beers Company is the creation of Cecil Rhodes, and therefore it had to be an empire-making concern one way or the other.

One night there was a conversation between three men in Kimberley, which deserves to become historical. The three men were Alfred Beit, Barnie Isaacs Barnato, and Cecil John Rhodes. Each of these three men had something that the others wanted. Beit and Barnato don’t seem to have wanted much more than good business, but Alfred Beit already knew Cecil Rhodes for something much greater and better than merely a business man and piler-up of money-bags, so he supported them.

What Rhodes wanted was nothing less than the levying of a subsidy on the diamond mining industry of Kimberley, for the purpose of empire-making in the north. Barnie Barnato kicked at this. In the end he gave way, as he always did to Rhodes, and the result was that the De Beers Corporation was virtually taxed to the extent of half a million sterling for that northward expansion which Cecil Rhodes made possible when he persuaded Sir Hercules Robinson to proclaim the Bechuanaland Protectorate and checkmated the Germans on the west and the Boers on the east just as they were going to join hands across it.

What they really meant to do may be easily inferred from Van Niekerk’s raid into the so-called Stella-Land which necessitated Sir Charles Warren’s expedition—for which the Pretorian Government still owes us about a million and a half—and Colonel Ferreira’s attempted raid across the Limpopo into Matabeleland which was only stopped by Dr. Jameson’s Maxims.

If it had not been for Cecil Rhodes and the De Beers half million, the British flag would not now be flying over a region as large as France and Germany combined which, by all appearances, is destined to be the nucleus of the South African Empire of the day after to-morrow.

In such a vast country as South Africa—how big it is may be guessed from the comparison between it and England on the map—the first requisite for advancing civilisation is a road, the next a telegraph, and the next is a railway, and the absolute necessity of these to the new domain that he was making for Britain was of course plainly apparent to such a man as Cecil Rhodes.

His dream, which, if he lives long enough, he will certainly realise, is the making of that British high road from Cairo to Cape Town which Gordon, but for the baseness which betrayed him to his death, would certainly now be helping to make from the other end. Therefore when there was a shortness of money for the making of the railway to Mafeking, and for carrying the telegraph up through Rhodesia and northward across the Zambesi, the deficiency was supplied out of the capacious pockets of the man who, if he had only had the chance, would have been so glad to give that £12,000 for Delagoa Bay, and who knows Africa well enough to see that with its rinderpest, its locusts, and its horse-sickness, it stands in more need of mechanical transit and communication than any other part of the world.

When the extension of the Beira railway became necessary Cecil Rhodes, by the sheer force of his own character, persuaded Lord Rothschild to put down £25,000, every penny of which the great financier believed was going to be “chucked into the sea.” His Lordship probably thinks differently now.

Perhaps the most salient feature in the contemporary history of South 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.