If in the twentieth century history is losing its hold on the thought and feeling of the rising generation, Green is the last man whom we can blame. He gave all his faculties unsparingly to his task—patience, enthusiasm, single-hearted love of truth; and he encouraged others to do the same. No man was more free from the pontifical airs of those historians who proclaimed history as an academic science to be confined within the chilly walls of libraries and colleges. We may apply to his work what Mr. G. M. Trevelyan has said of the English historians from Clarendon down to recent times; it was 'the means of spreading far and wide, throughout all the reading classes, a love and knowledge of history, an elevated and critical patriotism, and certain qualities of mind and heart'.[59] Against the danger which he mentions in his next sentence, that we are now being drilled into submission to German models, Mr. Trevelyan is himself one of our surest protectors.
CECIL RHODES
1853-1902
| 1853. | Born at Bishop's Stortford, July 5. |
| 1870. | Goes out to Natal. |
| 1871. | Moves to Kimberley. |
| 1873-81. | Intermittent visits to Oxford. |
| 1880. | First De Beers Company started. |
| 1880. | Member for Barkly West. |
| 1883. | Commissioner in Bechuanaland. |
| 1885. | Warren expedition: Bechuanaland annexed by British Government. |
| 1887. | Acute rivalry between Rhodes and Barnato. |
| 1888. | Barnato gives way: De Beers Consolidated founded. |
| 1888. | Lobengula grants concession for mining. |
| 1889. | British South Africa Chartered Company formed. |
| 1890. | Prime Minister of Cape Colony. |
| 1890. | Occupation of Mashonaland. |
| 1893. | Second Rhodes ministry. |
| 1893. | War with Lobengula. Matabeleland occupied. |
| 1895. | 'Drifts' question between Cape and Transvaal Government. |
| 1895. | Jameson Raid, December 28. |
| 1896. | January, Rhodes's resignation. Visit to England. |
| 1896. | Rebellion in Rhodesia. |
| 1897. | Inquiry into the Raid by Committee of the House of Commons. |
| 1899. | D.C.L., Oxford. |
| 1899. | Outbreak of Great Boer War. |
| 1902. | Dies at Muizenberg, March 26. |
CECIL RHODES
Colonist
The Rhodes family can be traced back to sturdy English yeoman stock. In the eighteenth century they had held land in North London. Cecil's father was vicar of Bishop's Stortford, a quiet country town in Hertfordshire on the Essex border; he was a man of mark, wealthy, liberal, and unconventional, with the rare gift of preaching ten-minute sermons which were well worth hearing. Of his eldest sons, Herbert went to Winchester, Frank to Eton; Cecil, the fifth son, born on July 5, 1853, was kept at home. He had part of his education at the local Grammar School, but perhaps the better part at the Vicarage from his father himself. The shrewd Vicar soon saw that his fifth son was not fitted for the ordinary routine of professional life at home, and at the age of seventeen he was sent out to visit his brother Herbert, who had emigrated to Natal. Cecil said good-bye to his native land for the first time in 1870, and thus early elected to be a citizen of the Greater Britain beyond the seas.