South Africa,' which was published immediately after the outbreak of the war, we find this review of the situation :

'In Cape Colony and Natal there was before December, 1895, no hostility at all between the British and the Dutch elements. Political parties in Cape Colony were, in a broad sense, British and Dutch, but the distinction was really based not so much on racial differences as on economic interests. The rural element, which desired a protective tariff and laws regulating native labour, was mainly Dutch, the commercial element wholly British. Mr. Rhodes, the embodiment of British Imperialism, was Prime Minister through the support of the Dutch element in the Afrikander Bond. The Englishmen and Dutchmen were everywhere in the best social relations. The old blood sympathy of the Dutch element for the Transvaal Boers, which had been so strongly manifested in 1881, when the latter were struggling for their independence, had been superseded, or at least thrown into the background by displeasure at the unneighbourly policy of the Transvaal Government in refusing public employment to Cape Dutchmen as well as to Englishmen, and in throwing obstacles in the way of trade in agricultural products. This displeasure culminated when the Transvaal Government, in the summer of 1895, closed the drifts (fords) on the Vaal River to the detriment of imports from the colony and the Orange Free State.

'In the Orange Free State. . . . there was perfect good feeling and cordial co-operation in all public matters between the Dutch and the English elements. There was also perfect friendliness to Britain, the old grievances of the diamond. fields dispute and of the rest of the Free State conquest of Basutoland having been virtually forgotten. Towards the Transvaal there was a political sympathy, based partly on kinship, partly on a similarity of republican institutions. But there was also some annoyance at the policy which the Transvaal Government, and especially its Hollander advisers, were pursuing, coupled with the desire to see reforms effected in the Transvaal and the franchise granted to immigrants on more liberal

terms.'

CHAPTER VI1

MR. RHODES

All men without distinction are allured by immediate advantages; great minds alone are excited by distant good. So long as wisdom in its projects calculates upon wisdom, or relies upon its own strength, it forms none but chimerical schemes, and runs a risk of making itself the laughter of the world; but it is certain of success, and may reckon upon aid and admiration, when it finds a place in its intellectual plans for barbarism, rapacity and superstition, and can render the selfish passions of mankind the executors of its purposes (Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War').2

AMONG the personal factors in the South African problem Mr. Rhodes has been, and is likely to be, certainly the most interesting, probably the most potent, and certainly the most misrepresented.

The most ardent of Mr. Rhodes' admirers would not deny that he has his full share of human faults and frailties, but they are not of the kind generally imputed to him. His imperfections are largely superficial, and derived from the environment in which he has passed the greater part of his active life. It has been noted by nearly every writer familiar with the atmosphere of mining camps that it conduces to the formation of a very cynical estimate of human nature, and to a belief in that dictum in which Sir Robert Walpole crystallized his experience of eighteenth-century Parliaments.

1 This chapter was completed as long ago as February in 1901; at that time I had every reason to believe and to hope that Mr. Rhodes would himself read the pages I had written about him. On the very day (March 26, 1902) that I am passing these pages through the press, Mr. Rhodes died. I have therefore deliberately refrained from altering what I had written and from making any additions to the text. It stands, therefore, in all respects as it was penned thirteen months ago, a plain record of my impressions of a living man as I knew him from intimate personal converse and from a close study of his public utterances.

2 Bohn's translation, p. 42. Schiller is discussing the character of Henry of Navarre.