CECIL RHODES

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 July 1936, Page 5

CECIL RHODES

MAN OF MANY WILLS. Cecil Rhodes began life with nothing but ill health, says a writer in the “Winnipeg Free Press.” When he died—before he was fifty his name had become famous all over the world. He had founded an empire, and he had amassed £6,000,000. These achievements are not ranged in any order of merit. They are mentioned to show the extraordinary qualities, of the map. >. ; ir , .. 11. ... Rhodes has been dead more than thirty yearef,’ 1 afidT’bur perspective of his age has .lengthened and changed i with the years. When he died, it is safe to say, the' obituary notices laid a good deal of emphasis upon his consolidation of the Kimberley diamond field; buf concentrated; mainly upon his .connection with the Jameson Raid, the last important incidentleading up to the Boer War, which was still in progress. To-day you would probably walk up Main Street and meet not a'-single citizen' who knows what the Jameson Raid was. That ill-starred and lawless venture has slink into merited obscurity, although there remains a handful of pundits still ready to argue the measure of Rhodes’s responsibility in the matter. The however, was important enough for Rhodes, whose official career crashed with its failure, and it is proper, therefore, • that a recent film should take the Raid for its diamatic culmination. The fault to find with the movie is not that. The real fault surely is . that the film Rhodes is a. far too gentle and respectable tvpe. Admitted that Rhodes was a great idealist, a gifted administrator. He was much more than that. The man who could dominate ,the diamond , fields and outwit Barney Bapia'to was a fellow who surely had some heavy . traces in, his blood of the lon S , ai ] d distinguished line which includes in its descent such figures as the Caesari, Attilas, Borgias, Morgans, and Capones. One should refresh one’s mind with a recollection of the spacious days of the British Empire when the lesser breeds without the law ; were being taught that' one English- ' mail was worth two Frenchmen, three 1 German.-., _ ” and one hundred ' and nineteen members of any Bantu ’ tribe between the Cape and Cairo. ’ Cecil Rhodes is now, chiefly remembered by the world for the amazing ’ set of scholarships which he left. A ' large chunk of the £6,000,000. estate ’ was placed in the hands of trustees, I who distribute it annually to lucky > young fellows from the Dominions i and the United States to pursue their studies at Oxford and elsewhere. . NOT THE SAME.

There have' been many great and spectacular educational foundations both beforehand since. -But none of them in spaciousness come near the foundation left by the Kimberley Magnifico. It is interesting to recall that this amazing institution known as the Rhodes Trust represents Only a fragment—:and a very small though practical fragment—of the grandiose plans which conceived? when he was a youngster in his twenties. Rhodes made six'Rifferent wills, at different periods of his life. The last embodies the'scholarship scheme we now>l<how. i The first r< was drawn up in 1877; after--he' had- had -his . first serious' heart attack, when he -was in the- iriidst of the cbriiplex speculations/-, which placed' 90, per-Cent of the world’s diamonds in his .pocket. In it he left the fortune, which he had •not! .yet; -made, ■lpr > -f‘thei establishment promotion, and development of a Sec

ret Society, the aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus,and Candia,.the whole of South America,'othe islands of the Pacific' not heretofore, possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States 'of .America, as an' integral part of the Empire . . and finally, the foundation of so great a power as hereafter to render wars impossible and. promote the best interests of ffu’manity.” ' Cecil Rhodes, even at twenty-four, must have known that to push this programme through would drench the world in grief, and blood. He justified it with the. sublime faith of the Englishman that, once British settlers had got this handful of strategic points, comprising a couple of continents, the Far Eastern littoral and the United-States, the world would be so well governed (by Englishmen, of course) that war would never again take place. The methods used on the Matabele as Rhodes’s chartered company carved out Rhodesia were grim, yet even the conquest of Matabeleiand left a good, part of Rhodes’s youthful programme still to be achieved.....lt was, in fact, only a first small nibble.,'’ Let us admit that Rhodes threw these youthful dreams away. But surely there remained in the mind that conceived them something stern and crazy as well, which all goes into the character of an extraordinary nineteenth century figure.