RHODES'S DREAM

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 82, 7 April 1938, Page 16

RHODES'S DREAM

It is instructive at the present time to consider what Cecil Rhodes said at various periods of his life on universal peace, says the "Manchester Guardian."' In 1877, in a letter to W. T. Stead, he set out his political creed: "I contend' that we are the first race in the world, and that the more we inhabit the better it is for the human race. ' The absorption of the ■ world under our rule simply means the end of all war." He states that it is his object to work "for the bringing of the whole civilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making of_ the Anglo-Saxon race into one Empire." In his first will, made in the same 'year, he provides for a secret society, on the model of the Jesuits, to promote this end. "The whole continent of Africa," says a biographer of this modern Loyola, "is to be settled by Britons, and also the whole continent of South America, the Holy Land, the Valley of- the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, and, finally, the United States. In the end Great Britain is to establish a Power so overwhelming that wars must cease and the millennium be realised." This ideal Rhodes further elaborated in a series of wills, made at various periods of his life;- till at last his aircastle took mundane shape in the Rhodes Scholarships. But how fantastic, how much in. the manner of Aristophanes, must appear at the present hour that touch about the "seaboard, of China and Japan'l Ai , r (