Rhodes had not been a brilliant student; but he was a persistent and a logical thinker. Long before he finished his College course he had set himself certain problems such as seldom occur to the ordinary man, and whose solution is rarely attempted even by extraordinary men. What was most important, he met his problems squarely, carried his thinking to conclusions, and his conclusions into practice.
Throughout his life he cherished a fond memory of his student days and a deep reverence for his University. His high respect for Oxford grew not alone from the happy impressions of early and careless years. He matriculated when twenty years old. For the next eight years he alternated between winters spent in South Africa amid the influences of frontier life, and summers spent in the social and academic atmosphere of Oxford. When, after eight years, he took his degrees, B.A. and M.A. together (1881), he was already a successful business man, well on his way to maturity (b. 1853). Thus he had been an Oxford undergraduate both as a youth and as a man, and had learned the theories and practices of Oxford side-by-side with the practical experiences of business life during the impressionable years of early manhood.
During these undergraduate days he had been deeply impressed by a passage from Aristotle—‘Virtue is the highest activity of the soul living for the highest object in a perfect life.’ He appreciated Aristotle’s emphasis upon the necessity for having a high ideal and for struggling toward that ideal. He revolved in his mind while in Oxford and in Africa, as he went and came, and during his summers here and his winters there, many problems as to the end and object of existence. What is the end of the process of evolution? Is it man? For what end does man exist? Why do I exist? What does my existence demand of me? Is there a God? If so, what does he wish man to do? What would he have me do? What can I do best?
He became conscious of a desire for power—effective, creative power, the power which ‘does things.’ He early decided, and he never changed his opinion, that the ‘open sesame’ to the realm of power was money. The opportunity for making money lay before him; the ability and the business capacity lay within him; money was his. Yet wealth was not his end; he never made money an end; it was always a means.
His self-interrogation did not cease. He decided that his first great duty was to his country. What is this duty?—he asked himself. Naturally, to further her interests. Her interests are?—Those of the British Empire. And those are?—To advance civilization and the cause of universal peace. What could he do? He decided that he would ‘paint as much as possible of the map of South Africa British red’. But patriotism should not be selfish—nor should it be narrow. He looked beyond the boundaries of the Empire. ‘What race can do, is doing, and will do most to advance civilization?’ He answered himself that the Anglo-Saxon race was the race of the Present and of the Future—the instrument of Destiny. Therefore, he would devote himself to the ideas which the Anglo-Saxon race represents.
These conclusions were recorded in a ‘draft of some of my ideas’ which Rhodes put upon paper while in Kimberley, when he was about twenty-four years of age (1877). He continued with a consideration of how his ideas might be made effective. His fancy suggested the formation of a kind of secular church which should have its members in all parts of the Empire, especially at the Universities, and whose common interest should be the extension of the Empire. He sketched the kind of men upon whom he could depend, the method by which they might be recruited, keeping ever in mind ‘the closer union of England and her Colonies’.
First Will, 1877.
That same year he wrote a Will in which he directed that all his estates and effects of every kind should be administered to promote British rule; to perfect a system of emigration from the United Kingdom to the Colonies; to further the consolidation of the British Empire; to assist towards the restoration of Anglo-Saxon unity; towards securing the representation of the Colonies in Parliament, and the foundation of a Power so great as to render wars impossible and to promote the best interests of humanity.
At that early period, then, we find—not the idea of the Rhodes Scholarships—but the ideas which dominated Rhodes’s subsequent imperial theories, the soil which was ready to receive the suggestion which seems later to have come spontaneously, of founding and defining a scholarship system.
Second Will, 1882.