Cecil Rhodes, Man and Empire-Maker

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

Believing Sir Alfred to be the confederate of Rhodes, the Boers, too, would have nothing to do with him. Whilst the Bloemfontein Conference was going on President Kruger, as well as the leaders of the Afrikander Bond, were overwhelmed with covert warnings to distrust the High Commissioner. Whence they emanated is not a matter of much doubt. Sir Alfred was accused of wanting to lay a trap for the Boer plenipotentiaries, who were told to beware of him as an accomplice of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, whose very name produced at Pretoria the same effect as a red rag upon a bull. Under these circumstances the Conference was bound to fail, and the High Commissioner returned to Cape Town, very decidedly a sadder and most certainly a wiser man.

Now that years have passed since the Boer War it is possible to secure a better perspective, in the light of which one can question whether it would have been possible to avoid the conflict by an arrangement of some kind with the Boer Republics, Personally, I believe that an understanding was not out of the question if the strong financial interests had not opposed its accomplishment; but at the same time a patched up affair would not have been a happy event for either South Africa or for England. It would have left matters in almost the same condition as they had been before, and the millionaires, who were the real masters on the Rand, would have found a dozen pretexts to provoke a new quarrel with the Transvaal Government. Had the Boer Executive attempted to do away with the power of the concerns which ruled the gold mines and diamond fields, it would have courted a resistance with which it would have been next to impossible to deal. The war would still have taken place, but it might have occurred at a far less favourable moment. No arrangement with President Kruger, even one most propitious to British interests, could have done away with the corruption and the bribery which, from the first moment of the discovery of the gold fields, invaded that portion of South Africa, and this corruption would always have stood in the way of the establishment of the South African Union.

Sir Alfred Milner knew all this very well, and probably had an inward conviction, notwithstanding his efforts to prevent the war, that a conflict was the only means of breaking these chains of gold which shackled the wheels of progress. At so critical a time the support of Rhodes and his party would have been invaluable. And Sir Alfred would have welcomed it. Cecil Rhodes, of course, had declared himself officially in accord with the High Commissioner, and even praised him to a degree of fulsomeness. But the ulterior motive was simply to excite the Dutch party against him. The reputation of Sir Alfred Milner as a statesman and as a politician was constantly challenged by the very people who ought to have defended it. Rhodes himself had been persuaded that the Governor harboured the most sinister designs against his person. The innuendo was one of the most heinous untruths ever invented by his crowd of sycophants.

An opportunity came my way, by which I was able to convince myself how false was the belief nourished by Rhodes against Milner. During the course of a conversation with Sir Alfred, I boldly asked him whether he was really such an enemy of Rhodes as represented. I was surprised by the moderate tone in which he replied to my, after all, impertinent question. The remarks which we then exchanged filled me with the greatest admiration for the man who so nobly, and so worthily, upheld British prestige in South Africa under the most trying circumstances. Milner was an entirely honest man—the rarest thing in the whole of Cape Town at that anxious period—and after one had had the advantage of discussing with him the political situation, one could only be filled with profound respect for him and for his opinions, actions and conduct. Far from working against Rhodes, as Sir Alfred had been represented to me as doing, I convinced myself that he was keenly anxious to be on good and, what is more important, on sincere terms with him. Sir Alfred had not the slightest feeling of animosity against the Dutch. On the contrary, he would have liked them to become persuaded of his desire to protect them against possible aggression by the Jingoes, whose offensive conduct none more than himself assessed at its true value.

But what was the real situation? He found his every action misconstrued; whatever he did was interpreted in a wrong sense, and those who should have shared his aims were plotting against him. The position was truly tragic from whatever side it was viewed, and a weaker or less honest man would assuredly have given up the struggle.

A few days after my conversation with Sir Alfred Milner, which took place during the course of a dinner at Government House, I took opportunity to mention it to Rhodes. I tried to clear his mind of the suspicions that I knew he entertained in regard to the High Commissioner. Cecil Rhodes listened to me with attention, then asked me in that sarcastic tone of his, which was so intensely disagreeable and offensive, whether I was in love with Sir Alfred, as I had so suddenly become his champion. Then he ended, "You are trying to make me believe the impossible." I did not allow him, however, to ruffle me, as evidently was his desire, but replied that when one came to know better those whom one had only met occasionally, without ever having talked with them seriously, it was natural to amend one's opinion accordingly. I told him, too, that my earlier misapprehension had been intensified by a certain lady who posed as Rhodes' greatest friend, and who had been loud in her denunciations of the High Commissioner, long before I had ever met him. But now, I added, I had come to the conclusion that Sir Alfred had been terribly maligned.

At this point Rhodes interrupted me with the remark: "So you think that he is a paragon. Well, I won't contradict you, and, besides, you know that I have always defended him; but still, with all his virtues, he has not yet found out what he ought to do with me."

"What can one do with you, Mr. Rhodes?" I asked with a smile.

"Leave me alone," was the characteristic reply, in a tone which was sufficient for me to follow the advice, as it meant that the man was getting restive and might at any moment break out into one of those fits of rage which he so often used as a means to bring to an end a conversation in which he felt that he might not come out as victor.

A few days later a rabid Rhodesian who happened to be staying at Groote Schuur approached me. "You have been trying to convert Mr. Rhodes to Sir Alfred," he remarked.