do common service for a common end—that, indeed, is an object for which it is worth while to make some sacrifice. Such a publication so supported would be at once an education and an inspiration; and who can say, looking at the present condition of England and of America, that it is not needed?
That was my idea as I expressed it. That was Mr. Rhodes’s idea also. It was “our idea”—his idea of the secret society—broadened and made presentable to the public without in any way revealing the esoteric truth that lay behind. Mr. Rhodes recognised this and eagerly welcomed it.
Mr. Rhodes returned to England in 1891, and the day after his arrival he came round to Mowbray House and talked for three hours concerning his plans, his hopes, and his ideas. Fortunately, immediately after he left I dictated to my secretary a full report of the conversation, which, as usual, was very discursive and ranged over a great number of subjects of the day. It was in this conversation, after a close and prolonged argument, that he expressed his readiness to adopt the course from which he had at first recoiled—viz., that of securing the unity of the English-speaking race by consenting to the absorption of the British Empire in the American Union if it could not be secured in any other way. In his first dream he clung passionately to the idea of British ascendency—this was in 1877—in the English-speaking union of which he then thought John Bull was to be the predominant partner. But in 1891, abandoning in no whit his devotion to his own country, he expressed his deliberate conviction that English-speaking reunion was so great an end in itself as to justify even the sacrifice of the monarchical features and isolated existence of the British Empire. At our first conversation in 1889 he had somewhat demurred to this frank and logical acceptance of the consequences of his own principles; but in 1891 all hesitation disappeared, and from that moment the ideal of English-speaking reunion assumed its natural and final place as the centre of his political aspirations. He resumed very eagerly his conversation as to the realisation of his projects. He was in high spirits, and expressed himself as delighted with the work which I had done in founding the Review of Reviews, and especially with the effort which was made to
