General) first proposed that I should meet him, I was so far from realising what it meant that I refused. Sir Charles Mills repeated his invitation with a persistency and an earnestness which overcame my reluctance; I abandoned a previous engagement, and accepted his invitation to lunch, for the purpose of meeting Mr. Rhodes.
Mr. Rhodes, said Sir Charles Mills, wished to make my acquaintance before he returned to Africa. I met Mr. Rhodes at the Cape Agency, and was introduced to him by Sir Charles Mills on April 4th, 1889. After lunch, Sir Charles left us alone, and I had a three hours’ talk with Mr. Rhodes. To say that I was astonished by what he said to me is to say little. I had expected nothing—was indeed rather bored at the idea of having to meet him—and vexed at having to give up my previous engagement. But no sooner had Sir Charles Mills left the room than Mr. Rhodes fixed my attention by pouring out the long dammed-up flood of his ideas. Immediately after I left him I wrote:—
“I have never met a man who, upon broad Imperial matters, was so entirely of my way of thinking.”
On my expressing my surprise that we should be in such agreement, he laughed and said—
“It 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 then told me what surprised me not a little, and what will probably come to many of those who admire him to-day with a certain shock.
He said that although he 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 want—one who has not only the right principles, but is more anxious to promote them than to save his own skin.” He 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
