CHAPTER IV.—HIS SPEECHES.
Mr. Rhodes’s speeches between 1881 and 1899 were collected and published in 1900 (publishers, Chapman and Hall). Whether the publication of Mr. Rhodes’s speeches will tend to vindicate his reputation—as the publication of Oliver Cromwell’s speeches tended to justify the favourable verdict of Mr. Carlyle—remains to be seen. Here, at least, we have material for judgment. In this book, the painstaking research of a chronicler who preferred to veil his identity behind the pseudonym of “Vindex,” are collected all the public speeches of Mr. Rhodes which have ever been reported since he entered public life in the Cape in 1881, down to his famous speech at Kimberley immediately after the relief of the beleaguered city.
These speeches, however, we are given to understand, have neither been bowdlerised nor edited, excepting so far as is necessary to correct the somewhat slipshod grammar of Colonial reporters, excusable enough when grappling with the ill-hewn sentences of a man who thinks as he is speaking. Mr. Rhodes, however, had no reason to fear being tried by this ordeal. He does not emerge an immaculate saint, carved in the whitest of Parian marble. He is revealed not as an archangel of radiant stainless purity, but neither was he a cloven-footed devil. Judging him by his stature in influence, in authority and in driving force, he belonged to the order of archangels; but he was a grey archangel, with a crippled wing, which caused him to pursue a somewhat devious course in the midst of the storm-winds of race-passion and political intrigue. A grey archangel crossed with a Jesuit, who was so devoted to his ends that almost all means were to him indifferent, excepting in so far as they helped him to attain his goal—that is the man who is revealed to us in these speeches,
Mr. Rhodes did not execute so many curves in his political career as did Mr. Gladstone. His course, with one great and lamentable exception, was characterised by an unswerving adhesion to one political line; but throughout the whole of his life there was manifest the same steady purpose, to which he
