CECIL RHODES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21562, 5 August 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

CECIL RHODES

DREAMER OF EMPIRE

BY KOTARE

" So much to do, so little done." These were the words with which the dying Rhodes gasped his last protest against the fate that doomed him to lay aside 'his millions and the power they gave him and tho dreams they were to make come true. He was fortyeight years of age. " A man might think tho worshippings, crownings and scourgings of this world an equal futility who had given his name to a country and could not get a little air."

He had not expected to reach fortyfive. All his life he had fought illhcaltli in its most menacing forms. He was sent to South Africa when he was sixteen. His lungs had failed him and tho cold and damp of an English winter would have killed him. Ho joined a brother in Natal, found something that promised quicker returns in the newly-discovered diamond fields at Kimberley, and contracted heart disease in ~ addition to his tubercular trouble. Ho returned to Oxford, broke down again, this time apparently without hope. But he beat tho English climate in the end and crowded into thirty years the labours of lift}' men, as his latest and greatest biographer, Sarah Millin, estimates his work for Africa and Britain and himself. When he was forty his heart gave out appar-. ently for good. He knew tho writing was on the wall, and incredibly quickened the tempo of his strenuous life that he might complete the day's work the darkness fell. One thinks of Keats feverishly burning out his brief life in tho effort to glean tho harvest of his teeming brain. The Handicap Rhodes lived eight years instead of the five tho doctors had given him as the outside limit when ho stood in the middle of his years. He did not pity himself and ho asked no pity from others. Never was a man more hated and never was a man more worshipped. Hate and adulation alike meant nothing to him. He had a demonic concentration on what ho conceived his mission for the world. H° whipped tho diseased body to its superhuman task. Call him what you will, curse him as Meredith did when he longed to scourge him with his crown still on him, dub him robber, rogufe, hypocrite, if such be your judgment on him, but you cannot deny him the glory of the supreme fighter who won perhaps his greatest victory over his own treacherous body and drove it till even his will could not make it function at the bidding of the imperious spirit that had so long dominated it. Many a man's soul has o'erinformed the tenement of clay. But none that I know has won through against greater odds than Cecil Rhodes. Nobody who has followed Mrs. Millin's " masterly delineation of this modern Colossus, will easily assign to him' the glib epithets of condemnation with which his enemies have branded him. It is a, parlous business summing up a complex personality in an easy phrase either of praise or of condemnation. How are we to assess the final values of a man so far outside and beyond the conventional standards that suffice to place most of us? And even the simplest and directest of us is compounded of diverse and inconsistent elements. The threads that weave the pattern of any life are never of a piece. Where the pattern is as bold and flamboyant as Rhodes', and the weaving is done in the fierce white light of publicity, the easy judgment is certain to be the false judgment. The Vision Rhodes was not yet twenty when he returned to Oxford to take his place as an undergraduate in the only college that would take him. He was already wealthy, for he had the Midas touch even as a boy. Here at Oxford came first the dreams that were to dominate his life and add enormously to British African possessions. And it was from Ruskin, then lecturing in Oxford, that Rhodes caught the gleam he followed with such terrific concentration of purpose throughout his crowded years. Ruskin (what was this Saul*doing among tho imperialistic prophets?) declared to his students: " England must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing any piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea." From that seed dropped by Ruskin the grandiose dreams of Empire which ruled Rhodes' life and gave meaning to his money-making sprang almost overnight. England~i epresented to him the highest in character and political sense that the world had known. To his youthful patriotism that was axiomatic. If, then, English standards were immeasurably superior to those of any other nation, the greatest service which any man could confer on the world was to bring as much of it as possible under English control. It was not that England wanted moro colonies merely for self-aggrandise-ment. But this was England's mission to the world. Sho could do her best servico to the world by bringing moro and more of it under her flag. That was England's imperial destiny which she could neglect only at her own peril and to the exceeding detriment of tho world. A World Empire Rhodes knew something of Africa. Tlie only vast areas still in tho hands of savage races were to be found in Africa. Africa, then, was- the field where England must set about her imperial mission 011 a proper scale. She held the southern fringe. "Go North " must be her watchword, and every true Englishman would toil and servo and amass money only to further this northward march. After Africa, the turn of the rest of the world could come. Tho greatest disaster that had ever befallen England was the loss of the American colonies. This must bo remedied some time in tho near future. England must get control of America again. Then she would bo strong enough to end all wars, for universal poaco always floated in tho background of his dreams. Later, his African dream proving moro difficult of realisation than he had anticipated, 110 decided that tho futuro lay not solely in tho expansion of England, but in the co-operation of the Anglo-Saxon, the English-speaking races. America and England together would take up the mission of spreading Anglo-Saxon culture and so remake the world.

It sounds to-day like a madman's vision. But it was the most real thing in the life of Rhodes, and with somo necessary modifications it held him to the day of his death. His Rhodes scholarships wore intended to further it after his death. How ho laid his plans, how he organised his advanco northward, how failure came after a success that astounded the world, and the man Rhodes became under the pressure of circumstance must wait for telling.