The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes/Part 2
PART II.
THE POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF MR. RHODES.
When Mr. Rhodes died, the most conspicuous figure left in the English-speaking race since the death of Queen Victoria disappeared. Whether loved or feared, he towered aloft above all his contemporaries. There are many who hold that he would be entitled to a black statue in the Halls of Eblis. But even those who distrusted and disliked him most, pay reluctant homage to the portentous energy of a character which has affected the world so deeply for weal or for woe. Outside England none of our politicians, statesmen, or administrators impressed the imagination of the world half as deeply as Cecil Rhodes. For good or for evil he ranked among the dozen foremost men of his day. He was one of the few men neither royal nor noble by birth who rose by sheer force of character and will to real, although not to titular, Imperial rank. After the Pope, the Kaiser, the Tsar, there were few contemporary statesmen who commanded as much attention, who roused as much interest, as the man who has passed from our midst while still in his prime. The few who knew him loved him. The majority, to whom he was unknown, paid him their homage, some of their admiration, and others of their hate. And it must be admitted that the dread he inspired among those who disliked him was more widespread than the affection he commanded from those who came within the magic of his presence. He is gone, leaving a gap which no one at present can ever aspire to fill. The world has echoed words and deeds of his which will long reverberate in the dim corridors of time.
To those who, like myself, have to bear the poignant grief caused by the loss of a dearly loved friend, whose confidence and affection had stood the test even of the violent antagonism roused by extreme difference of opinion on the subject of the South African War, it is impossible to speak of Cecil Rhodes at this moment with judicial impartiality. I knew him too intimately and loved him too well to care to balance his faults against his virtues or to lay a critical finger upon the flaws in the diamond. For with all his faults the man was great, almost immeasurably great, when contrasted with the pigmies who pecked and twittered in his shade. To those who are inclined to dwell more upon the wide-wasting ruin in which his fatal blunder involved the country that he loved, it may be sufficient to remark that even the catastrophe which was wrought by his mistake may contribute more to the permanent welfare of the Empire than all the achievements of his earlier life.
Mr. Rhodes’s last Will and Testament reveals him to the world as the first distinguished British statesman whose Imperialism was that of Race and not that of Empire. The one specific object defined in the Will as that to which his wealth is to be applied proclaims with the simple eloquence of a deed that Mr. Rhodes was colour-blind between the British Empire and the American Republic. His fatherland, like that of the poet Arndt, is coterminous with the use of the tongue of his native land. In his Will he aimed at making Oxford University the educational centre of the English-speaking race. He did this of set purpose, and in providing the funds necessary for the achievement of this great idea he specifically prescribed that every American State and Territory shall share with the British Colonies in his patriotic benefaction.
Once every year “Founder’s Day” will be celebrated at Oxford; and not at Oxford only, but wherever on the broad world’s surface half-a-dozen old “Rhodes scholars” come together they will celebrate the great ideal of Cecil Rhodes—the first of modern statesmen to grasp the sublime conception of the essential unity of the race. Thirty years hereafter there will be between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each one of whom will have had impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder.
It is, therefore, well to put on record in accessible form all available evidence as to the nature of his dream.
What manner of man was this Cecil Rhodes who has made 
The Earl of Rosebery
To answer this question we have, first of all, his own writings; secondly, his public speeches; and, lastly, we have confidential communings with the friends whom he loved and trusted.
Mr. Rhodes at home studying the Map of Africa.