MR. STEAD AND MR. RHODES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11999, 23 June 1902, Page 6

MR. STEAD AND MR. RHODES.

Me Ste\d publishes an interesting account of what ho calls the genesis of Mr. Rhodes will in the May number of the Review o* Reviews Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Stead were, despite vast differences between them, sympathisers in essentials, and Rhode, from the first number of the Review, was one of its warmest upholders. " And " says Mr Stead -this.idea he preserved to the last. He told me with great glee when last in England how he had his copy smuggled into "Kimberley during the siege at a, time when martial law forbade its circulation, and although lie made wry faces over some of my articles, he was to the cud keenly interested in its success." f It was to Mr. Stead he confided many of his schemes.' "' 1 tell you even-thing, he said to me, ' I tell you all my plans. You tell me all V our schemes, and when we get the northern country settled we shall be able to parry them out. It is necessary, he added, that I should tell you all my ideas, in order that vou may know what to do if I should go. But,' he went on, 'I am still full of vigour and life, and I don't expect that I shall require anyone but myself to administer my money for many years to come.' "It was in an interview in January, IC9D, that Mr. Rhodes first announced to me his intention to found scholarships. It is interesting to compare the first draft of his intentions with the final form in which it was given in his will of 1899 and its codicil of 1900. Ho told me that when he was on the Red Sea in 1893 a thought suddenly struck him that it would be a good thing to create a number of scholarships tenable at a residential English University that should be open to the various British colonies. THE GREAT IDEA.

" Ho proposed to found 12 scholarships every year, each tenable for three years, of the value of £250 a year, to be held at Oxford. H« said he had added a codicil to his will making provision for these scholarships, which would entail an annual charge upon his estate of about £10,000 a year. He explained that there would be three for French Canadians and three for British. Each of the Australasian colonies, including West Australia and Tasmania, was to have three —that is to say, one each year; but the Cape, because it was his own colony, was to have twice as many scholarships as any other colony. This, he said, he had done in order to give us, as his executors and heirs, a friendly lead as to the kind of thing he wanted done with his money. The scholarships were to be tenable at Oxford. " ' I have never met a man who, upon broad Imperial matters, was so entirely of my way of thinking,' said Mr. Rhodes. " On my expressing my surprise that we should be in such agreement, he laughed and said "'lt is not to be wondered at, because I have taken my ideas from the Pall Mall Gazette.' "The paper permeated South Africa, he said, and he had met it everywhere. " He said that, although ho had read regularly the Pall Mall Gazette in South Africa, it was not until the year 1885 that he had realised that the editor of the paper, whose ideas he had assimilated so eagerly, was a, person who was capable of defending his principles regardless of considerations of his own ease and safety. But when in 1885 I published ' The Maiden Tribute' and went to gaol for what I had done, he felt, '' Here is the man I ant—ono who has not only the right principles, but is more anxious to promote them than to save his own skin,' Ho tried to see me, drove up to Holloway Gaol, and asked to be admitted, was refused, and drove away in a pretty fume. Lord Russell of Killowen had the same experience, with the same result. No one can see a prisoner without an order from the Homo Office." RHODES' CHARACTER. " Writing to my wife in 1889, immediately after I had left him,. I said: — " ' Mr. Rhodes is my man, "'I have just had three hours' talk with him.

" 'He is full of a far more gorgeous idea in connection with the paper than even I have had. I cannot tell you his scheme, because it is too secret. But it involves millions. . . . He expects to own, before he dies, four or five millions, all of which he will leave to carry out the scheme of which the paper is an integral part. ... His ideas are federation, expansion, and consolidation of the Empire. "' He is . . . about 35, full of ideas, and regarding money only as a means to work his ideas. He believes more in wealth and endowments than I do. He is not religious in the ordinary sense, but has a deeply religious conception of his duty to the world, and thinks he can best serve it by working for England. He took to me; told mo things he has told to no other man, save X. . . . It seems all like a fairy dream.'

" It is not very surprising that it had that appearance. Never before or since had I met a. millionaire who calmly declared his intention to devote all his millions to carry out the ideas which I had devoted my life to propagate. " Mr. Rhodes was intensely sympathetic, and, like most sympathetic, people, he would shut tip like an oyster when he found that his' ideas on ' deep things' which were near to his heart moved listeners to cynicism or to sneers.

"He was almost apologetic about his suggestion that his wealth might be ' useful. ' Don't despise money,' he said. ' Your ideas are all right, but without money you can do nothing.' 'The twelve apostles did not find it so,' I said ; and so the talk went on."