"What would you do if you had Carnegie's money?" asked Bailey.
"I wouldn't waste it on libraries," he replied. "I would seize a South American Republic and annex it to the United States."
Rhodes had great admiration for America. He once said to Bailey: "The greatest thing in the world would be the union of the English-speaking people. I wouldn't mind if Washington were the capital." He believed implicitly in the invincibility of the Anglo-Saxon race, and he gave his life and his fortune to advance the British part of it.
For the last I have reserved the experience that will always rank first in my remembrance of Rhodesia. It was my visit to the grave of Rhodes. Most people who go to Rhodesia make this pilgrimage, for in the well-known tourist language of Mr. Cook, like Victoria Falls, it is "one of the things to see." I was animated by a different motive. I had often read about it and I longed to view the spot that so eloquently symbolized the vision and the imagination of the man I admired.
The grave is about twenty-eight miles from Bulawayo, in the heart of the Matopo Hills. You follow the road along which the body was carried nineteen years ago. You see the native hut where Rhodes often lived and in which the remains rested for the night on the final journey. You pass from the green low-lands to the bare frontiers of the rocky domain where the Matabeles fled after the second war and where the Father of Rhodesia held his historic parleys with them.
Soon the way becomes so difficult that you must leave the motor and continue on foot. The Matopos are a wild and desolate range. It is not until you are well beyond the granite outposts that there bursts upon you an immense open area,—a sort of amphitheatre in which the Druids might have held their weird ritual. Directly ahead you see a battlement of boulders projected by some immemorial upheaval. Intrenched between them is the spot where Rhodes rests and which is marked by a brass plate bearing the words: "Here Lie the Remains of Cecil John Rhodes." In his will he directed that the site be chosen and even wrote the simple inscription for the cover.
When you stand on this eminence and look out on the grim, brooding landscape, you not only realize why Rhodes called it "The View of the World," but you also understand why he elected to sleep here. The loneliness and grandeur of the environment, with its absence of any sign of human life and habitation, convey that sense of aloofness which, in a man like Rhodes, is the inevitable penalty that true greatness exacts. The ages seem to be keeping vigil with his spirit.
For eighteen years Rhodes slept here in solitary state. In 1920 the remains of Dr. Jameson were placed in a grave hewn out of the rock and located about one hundred feet from the spot where his old friend rests. It is peculiarly fitting that these two men who played such heroic part in the rise of Rhodesia should repose within a stone's throw of each other.
During these last years I have seen some of the great things. They included the British Grand Fleet in battle array, Russia at the daybreak of democracy, the long travail of Verdun and the Somme, the first American flag on the battlefields of France, Armistice Day amid the tragedy of war, and all the rest of the panorama that those momentous days disclosed. But nothing perhaps was more moving than the silence and majesty that invested the grave of Cecil Rhodes. Instinctively there came to my mind the lines about him that Kipling wrote in "The Burial":
It is his will that he look forth
Across the world he won—
The granite of the ancient North—
Great spaces washed with sun.