Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

It is almost impossible to believe that their hostility is really sincere. They know perfectly well that empire-making cannot be done with kid gloves on. They know, also, that the amount of actual good that Cecil Rhodes has done in South Africa, even apart from empire-making, is almost incalculable. None know this better than the loyal Dutch burghers of the Cape and the Kaffirs. The former call him “the Englishman with the Afrikander heart”; the latter call him their father. But for him there would probably not be many loyal Dutch at all at the Cape; and but for him also Matabeleland and Mashonaland would still be the happy hunting-ground of King Lobengula’s murdering, ravaging, and slave-making impis.

THAT HISTORIC INDABA IN THE MATOPPOS.

He is, in fact, as was plainly shown in that historic Indaba in the Matoppos, the one white man in South Africa whom the natives love and trust. It is not many men who, with millions enough to buy everything that the world has to sell in the way of comfort and luxury and honours—as distinguished from honour—who would have gone as he did, armed only with a walking-stick, into the stronghold of the Matabele, and there won from them the title of “the bull that separates the fighting bulls,”—in other words, the peacemaker—and stopped a war which, if the Imperial authorities had had their way, would have gone on into the next year, and would have cost four or five millions at least.

It is, by the way, characteristic of the strength of mind and fixity of purpose of this man, that he solemnly warned Sir Richard Martin that, if, after this, the war was continued, he would himself go and live among the Matabele, and wash his hands of the whole affair.

It is noteworthy, too, that this man, whom Olive Schreiner describes by the mouth of her impossible trooper as “death on niggers,” is, in the opinion of the niggers themselves, the greatest friend they ever had.

If all the work of all the societies and associations of amiable old ladies of both sexes for the Protection of the Aborigines and the Elevation of the Savage were put together, it would not amount to a tithe of what Cecil Rhodes has done for the natives of South Africa. The Glen-Grey Act alone has almost emptied the prisons of kaffir offenders, and as for his work at Kimberley, the effects of which I have myself seen, it would be difficult to speak too highly of it.

Thus, for instance, it is not generally known that Cecil Rhodes is the greatest practical temperance worker in the world. Every one knows that the curse of all savage races in contact with civilised peoples is liquor. When he was moving the second reading of the Glen-Grey Act he said:

“I know the curse of liquor. Personally at the Diamond Fields I have assisted in making ten thousand of these poor children hard-working and sober. They are now in compounds, healthy and happy. In their former condition the place was a hell upon earth, therefore my heart is thoroughly with the idea of removing liquor from the natives.”

I have myself seen “these poor children” happy, healthy, and sober, in the compounds of Kimberley. In the Transvaal and the Portuguese territory I have seen them drunken, degraded, and diseased, and I am in a position to say that every word of the above quotation is solid fact. I wonder how many of our professional temperance agitators could point to such a splendid achievement as that.