Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

He prevented him joining hands with the Germans across Bechuanaland, he stopped his raid into Matabeleland, he got his raiders stopped on the confines of Amatongaland—and so destroyed his cherished dream of a Transvaal seaboard—and, worse than all, he has made Rhodesia a so much better place even for Dutchmen to live in than the Transvaal, that the Boers are every day treking through the drifts of the Limpopo to live on British soil and under British rule—that of Paul Krüger and his German and Hollander hangers-on becoming impossible for self-respecting men to submit to just as fast as their avarice and stupidity can make it so.

Both these men have their dreams. Paul Krüger is not the sort of person whom any one would associate with an ideal. Still he has got one. It is a United States of South Africa, under what he is pleased to consider republican rule.

He is probably too ignorant to know that, with the possible exceptions of Russia and Turkey, there never was a civilised or half-civilised Government less like a republic than the corrupt and tyrannical oligarchy of Pretoria, but that’s what he means, and it is to fight for that and not to fight for the independence of the Transvaal, which he knows perfectly well is secured by the Imperial Government, that he has built his forts and imported his German officers, German cannon, and German rifles and ammunition.

Cecil Rhodes also has an ideal. It is a federation of the South African states, crown colony, republic and self-governing colony, each possessing the management of its own affairs, and directing them according to the will of the majority, and all united under the ægis of the British flag, and enjoying that equal freedom and security which cause nineteen out of every twenty emigrants from France and Germany to go and settle in British colonies rather than in their own.

Which of the two ideals will be realised is not very difficult to see. The one is artificial, unnatural, and two hundred years behind the times. The other is natural, logical, and if anything, a little bit ahead of the times, and the difference between them is not altogether unlike the difference between Paul Krüger and Cecil Rhodes.

It would, of course, be quite outside the range of human possibility for a man to have attained to the real greatness of Cecil Rhodes without having made a good many enemies, public and private.

Of his private enemies there is no need to say very much. In the first place, until human nature has changed very considerably, it would be quite impossible for any man to have been so uniformly and so brilliantly successful as Cecil Rhodes has been without making plenty of enemies both private and public. One of the very worst methods of promoting brotherly love in the breasts of men whose standard of manliness is not quite up to the average is to out-distance them in the race for political distinction, or to out-wit them in the trickery of finance—and I don’t suppose that any one would be readier to admit that, in its ultimate analysis, finance is mainly trickery than Cecil Rhodes himself.

This category would include practically all the private and personal enemies of Cecil Rhodes save one. The exception is, I regret to say, a woman, and that is a fact which naturally blunts the pen of criticism when it is held in the hands of a man. There would be no need to mention Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner—better known in literary circles as Olive Schreiner—here but for the fact that she has made it impossible to pass her over without notice by writing the most recent and, I fear I must also say, the most virulent and untruthful attack that has been made upon the personal character and public policy of our South African Empire-Maker.

And yet even this attack is in its way a sort of testimonial to the greatness of the man whose reputation it was intended to demolish, despite the fact that in it Cecil Rhodes is depicted as a monster of iniquity and as the head of a soulless and tyrannical corporation which has not only been guilty of all the crimes in the Decalogue, but has invented a few new ones to go on with. Strange to say, however, when Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner was once interrupted in one of her well-known denunciations of the greatest Englishman of his day with the remark that after all he was a great man, she exclaimed: “A great man! Of course he is, a very great man, and that’s the pity of it!” The almost unanimous verdict of the English and South African press on the deplorable literary and political blunder which Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner perpetrated in writing “Trooper Peter Halkett,” goes far to show that her personal estimate of her enemy is a good deal more correct than her literary and political estimate.

Of the public enemies of Cecil Rhodes it will suffice to point out briefly that, without one exception and whatever their nationality, they are also the enemies of his country. It is noteworthy too that Cecil Rhodes himself seems to have an instinctive perception of real as distinguished from apparent or merely superficial hostility to the British Empire.