The Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes/Part 2/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.—HIS WRITINGS.
I will deal with them each in their order, taking his writings first—writings which were made known to the world for the first time after his death. Of his last Will and Testament, executed in 1899, printed in the first part of this volume, I need not speak. I confine myself in this part to his other writings.
Cecil Rhodes, in the current phrase of the hour, was an empire maker. He was much more than that. Empire makers are almost as common as empire breakers, and, indeed, as in his case, the two functions are often combined. But Cecil Rhodes stands on a pedestal of his own. He was a man apart. It was his distinction to be the first of the new Dynasty of Money Kings which has been evolved in these later days as the real rulers of the modern world. There have been many greater millionaires than he. His friend and ally, Mr. Beit, could probably put down a bank-note for every sovereign Mr. Rhodes possessed, and still be a multi-millionaire. As a rich man Mr. Rhodes was not in the running with Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Rockefeller, or Mr. Astor. But although there have been many wealthier men, none of them, before Mr. Rhodes, recognised the opportunities of ruling the world which wealth affords its possessor. The great financiers of Europe have no doubt often used their powers to control questions of peace or war and to influence politics, but they always acted from a strictly financial motive. Their aims were primarily the shifting of the values of stocks. To effect that end they have often taken a leading hand in political deals. But Mr. Rhodes inverted the operation. With him political considerations were always paramount. If he used the market he did it in order to secure the means of achieving political ends. Hence it is no exaggeration to regard him as the first—he will not be the last—of the Millionaire Monarchs of the Modern World.
He was the founder of the latest of the dynasties which seems destined to wield the sceptre of sovereign power over the masses of mankind. He has fallen in mid-career. His plans are but rudely sketched in outline, and much of the work which he had begun is threatened with destruction by his one fatal mistake. But he lived long enough to enable those who were nearest to him to realise his idea and to recognise the significance of his advent upon the stage in the present state of the evolution of human society.
Mr. Rhodes was more than the founder of a dynasty. He aspired to be the creator of one of those vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations which, like the Society of Jesus, have played so large a part in the history of the world. To be more strictly accurate, he wished to found an Order as the instrument of the will of the Dynasty, and while he lived he dreamed of being both its Cæsar and its Loyola. It was this far-reaching, world-wide aspiration of the man which rendered, to those who knew him, so absurdly inane the speculations of his critics as to his real motives. Their calculations as to his ultimate object are helpful only because they afford us some measure of the range of their horizon. When they told us that Mr. Rhodes was aiming at amassing a huge fortune, of becoming Prime Minister of the Cape, or even of being the President of the United States of South Africa, of obtaining a peerage and of becoming a Cabinet Minister, we could not repress a smile. They might as well have said he was coveting a new pair of pantaloons or a gilded epaulette. Mr. Rhodes was one of the rare minds whose aspirations are as wide as the world. Such aspirations are usually to be discovered among the founders of religions rather than among the founders of dynasties. It is this which constituted the unique, and to many the utterly incomprehensible, combination of almost incompatible elements in Mr. Rhodes’s character. So utterly incomprehensible was the higher mystic side of Mr. Rhodes’s character to those among whom it was his fate to live and work, that after a few vain efforts to explain his real drift he gave up the task in despair. It would have been easier to interpret colour to a man born blind, or melody to one stone-deaf from his birth, than to open the eyes of the understanding of the “bulls” and “bears” of the Stock Exchange to the far-reaching plans and lofty ambitions which lay behind the issue of Chartereds. So the real Rhodes dwelt apart in the sanctuary of his imagination, into which the profane were never admitted. 
Lord Milner, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.
(From Mr. P. Tennyson-Cole’s portrait in the Royal Academy.)
When Mr. Rhodes had not yet completed his course at Oxford he drew up what he called “a draft of some of my ideas.” It was when he was in Kimberley. He wrote it, he said, in his letter to me of August, 1891, when he was about twenty-two years of age. When he promised to send this to me to read, he said, “You will see that I have not altered much as to my feelings.” In reality he must have written it at the beginning of 1877, otherwise he could not have referred to the Russo-Turkish War, which began in that year. On inquiry among those who were associated with him in his college days, I find that, although he talked much about almost every subject under heaven, he was very reticent as to the political ideas which were fermenting in his brain in the long days and nights that he spent on the veldt, away from intellectual society, communing with his own soul, and meditating upon the world-movements which were taking place around him. This document may be regarded as the first draft of the Rhodesian idea. It begins in characteristic fashion thus, with the exception of some passages omitted or summarised:—
“It often strikes a man to inquire what is the chief good in life; to one the thought comes that it is a happy marriage, to another great wealth, and as each seizes on the idea, for that he more or less works for the rest of his existence. To myself, thinking over the same question, the wish came to me to render myself useful to my country. I then asked the question, How could I?” He then discusses the question, and lays down the following dicta. “I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence. Added to this, the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars.” He then asks himself what are the objects for which he should work, and answers his question as follows: “The furtherance of the British Empire, for the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. What a dream! but yet it is probable. It is possible.”
“I once heard it argued—so low have we fallen—in my own college, I am sorry to own it, by Englishmen, that it was a good thing for us that we have lost the United States. There are some subjects on which there can be no argument, and to an Englishman this is one of them. But even from an American’s point of view just picture what they have lost. . . . . All this we have lost and that country has lost owing to whom? Owing to two or three ignorant, pigheaded statesmen in the last century. At their door is the blame. Do you ever feel mad, do you ever feel murderous? I think I do with these men.”
The rest of his paper is devoted to a discussion as to the best means of attaining these objects.
After recalling how the Roman Church utilises enthusiasm, he suggests the formation of a kind of secular Church for the extension of British Empire which should have its members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea, who should have its members placed at our universities and our schools, and should watch the English youth passing through their hands. Mr. Rhodes then proceeded to sketch the kind of men upon whose
Earl Grey.
help such a Church could depend, how they should be recruited, and how they would work to “advocate the closer union of England and her colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire.” He concludes: “I think that there are thousands now existing who would eagerly grasp at the opportunity.”
Even at this early date, it will be perceived, the primary idea which found its final embodiment in the will of 1899 had been sufficiently crystallised in his mind to be committed to paper. It was later in the same year of 1877 that he drew up his first will. This document he deposited with me at the same time that he gave me his “political will and testament.” It was in a sealed envelope, and on the cover was written a direction that it should not be opened until after his death. That will remained in my possession, unopened, until March 27th, 1902, when I opened it in the presence of Mr. Hawksley. It was dated Kimberley, September 19th, 1877. It was written throughout in his own handwriting. It opened with a formal statement that he gave, devised, and bequeathed all his estates and effects of every kind, wherever they might be, to the Secretary of State for the Colonies for the time being, and to Sidney Godolphin Alexander Shippard (who died almost immediately after Mr. Rhodes; Mr. Shippard was then Attorney-General for the province of Griqualand West), giving them full authority to use the same for the purposes of extending British rule throughout the world, for the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom to all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, the consolidation of the Empire, the restoration of the Anglo-Saxon unity destroyed by the schism of the eighteenth century, the representation of the colonies in Parliament, “and finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to hereafter render wars impossible and to promote the best interests of humanity.”
This first will contains the master thought of Rhodes’s life, the thought to which he clung with invincible tenacity to his dying day. The way in which he expressed it in these first writings which we have from his hand was “the furtherance of the British rule”; but in after years his ideas were broadened, especially in one direction—viz., the substitution of the ideal of the unity of the English-speaking race for the extension of the British Empire throughout the world. To the undergraduate dreamer in the diamond diggings it was natural that the rapidly growing power of the United States and the ascendency which it was destined to have as the predominant partner in the English-speaking world was not as clear as it became to him when greater experience and a wider outlook enabled him to take a juster measure of the relative forces with which he had to deal.
This first will was, however, speedily revoked. Mr. Rhodes seems to have soon discovered that the Colonial Secretary for the time being was of all persons the last to whom such a trust should be committed. He then executed his second will, which was a very informal document indeed. It was written on a single sheet of notepaper, and dated 1882. It left all his property to Mr. N. E. Pickering, a young man employed by the De Beers Company at Kimberley. Mr. Rhodes was much attached to him, and nursed him through his last illness. How much or how little he confided to Mr. Pickering about his ultimate aims I do not know, nor is there any means of ascertaining the truth, for Mr. Pickering has long been dead, and his secrets perished with him. Mr. Rhodes, in making the will in his favour, wrote him a note, saying the conditions were very curious, “and can only be carried out by a trustworthy person, and I consider you one.”
After the death of Mr. Pickering Mr. Rhodes executed a third will in 1888, in which, after making provision for his brothers and sisters, he left the whole of the residue of his fortune to a financial friend, whom I will call “X.,” in like manner expressing to him informally his desires and aspirations. This will was in existence when I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Rhodes.
All these wills were framed under the influence of the idea. which dominated Mr. Rhodes’s imagination. He aimed at the foundation of a Society composed of men of strong convictions and of great wealth, which would do for the unity of the English-speaking race what the Society of Jesus did for the Catholic Church immediately after the Reformation.
The English-speaking race stood to Mr. Rhodes for all that the Catholic Church stood to Ignatius Loyola. Mr. Rhodes saw in the English-speaking race the greatest instrument yet evolved for the progress and elevation of mankind—shattered by internal dissensions and reft in twain by the declaration of American Independence, just as the unity of the Church was destroyed by the Protestant Reformation. Unlike Loyola, who saw that between Protestants and Catholics no union was possible, and who therefore devoted all his energies to enable the Catholics to extirpate their adversaries, Mr. Rhodes believed that it was possible to secure the reunion of the race. Loyola was an out-and-out Romanist. He took sides unhesitatingly with the Pope against the Reformers. The attitude of Mr. Rhodes was altogether different. He was devoted to the old flag, but in his ideas he was American, and in his later years he expressed to me his unhesitating readiness to accept the reunion of the race under the Stars and Stripes if it could not be obtained in any other way. Although he had no objection to the Monarchy, he unhesitatingly preferred the American to the British Constitution, and the text-book which he laid down for the guidance of his novitiates was a copy of the American Constitution.
Imagine the soul of an Erasmus in the skin of a Loyola ready to purchase the unity of Christendom by imposing upon the Pope the theses which Luther nailed upon the church door at Wittenberg, and you have some idea of the standpoint of Mr. Rhodes.
He was for securing union, if necessary, by means which at first sight were little calculated to promote unity. If the American Constitution was his political text-book, his one favourite expedient for inducing Americans to recognise the need for unity was the declaration of a tariff war waged by means of differential duties upon imports from those English-speaking commonwealths which clapped heavy duties on British goods.
Finding that I sympathised with his ideas about English-speaking reunion and his Society—although I did not see eye to eye with him about the tariff war—Mr. Rhodes superseded the will, which he had made in 1888, on a sheet of notepaper, which left his fortune to “X.,” by a formal will, in which the whole of his real and personal estate was left to “X.” and to “W. Stead, of the Review of Reviews.” This will, the fourth in order, was signed in March, 1891.
On bidding me good-bye, after having announced the completion of this arrangement, Mr. Rhodes stated that when he got to Africa he would write out his ideas, and send them to me. It was in fulfilment of this promise that he sent me the letter dated August 19th and September 3rd, 1891. It was written by him at his own suggestion in order that I might publish it in literary dress in his name as an expression of his views. I carried out his instructions, and published the substance of this letter, with very slight modifications necessary to give it the clothing that he desired, as a manifesto to the electors at the General Election of 1895. Mr. Rhodes’s personality, however, at that time had not loomed sufficiently large before the mind of the British public for the expression of his opinions to excite the interest and attention of the world. But when I published the original draft after his death it was received everywhere as throwing altogether new light upon Mr. Rhodes’s character.
Mr. Rhodes’s political ideas were thus written out by him in one of the very few long letters which he ever wrote to anyone, just before his departure from Kimberley to Mashonaland in the autumn of 1891. The communication takes the shape of a vészmé of a long conversation which I had had with him just before he left London for the Cape. Despite a passage which suggests that I should sub-edit it and dress up his ideas, I think the public will prefer to have these rough, hurried, and sometimes ungrammatical notes exactly as Mr. Rhodes scrawled them off rather than to have them supplied with “literary clothing” by anyone else:—
Please remember the key of my idea discussed with you is a Society, copied from the Jesuits as to organisation, the practical solution a differential rate and a copy of the United States
Mr. Alfred Beit.
Constitution, for that is Home Rule or Federation, and an organisation to work this out, working in the House of Commons for decentralisation, remembering that an Assembly that is responsible for a fifth of the world has no time to discuss the questions raised by Dr. Tanner or the important matter of Mr. O’Brien’s breeches, and that the labour question is an important matter, but that deeper than the labour question is the question of the market for the products of labour, and that, as the local consumption (production) of England can only support about six millions, the balance depends on the trade of the world.
That the world with America in the forefront is devising tariffs to boycott your manufactures, and that this is the supreme question, for I believe that England with fair play should manufacture for the world, and, being a Free Trader, I believe until the world comes to its senses you should declare war—I mean a commercial war with those who are trying to boycott your manufactures—that is my programme. You might finish the war by union with America and universal peace, I mean after one hundred years, and a secret society organised like Loyola’s, supported by the accumulated wealth of those whose aspiration is a desire to do something, and a hideous annoyance created by the difficult question daily placed before their minds as to which of their incompetent relations they should leave their wealth to. You would furnish them with the solution, greatly relieving their minds and turning their ill-gotten or inherited gains to some advantage.
I am a bad writer, but through my ill-connected sentences you can trace the lay of my ideas, and you can give my idea the literary clothing
Mr. L. L. Michell.
that is necessary. I write so fully because I am off to Mashonaland, and I can trust you to respect my confidence. It is a fearful thought to feel that you possess a patent, and to doubt whether your life will last you through the circumlocution of the forms of the Patent Office. I have that inner conviction that if I can live I have thought out something that is worthy of being registered at the Patent Office; the fear is, shall I have the time and the opportunity? And I believe, with all the enthusiasm bred in the soul of an inventor, it is not self-glorification I desire, but the wish to live to register my patent for the benefit of those who, I think, are the greatest people the world has ever seen, but whose fault is that they do not know their strength, their greatness, and their destiny, and who are wasting their time on their minor local matters, but being asleep do not know that through the invention of steam and electricity, and in view of their enormous increase, they must now be trained to view the world as a whole, and not only consider the social questions of the British Isles. Even a Labouchere who possesses no sentiment should be taught that the labour of England is dependent on the outside world, and that as far as I can see the outside world, if he does not look out, will boycott the results of English labour. They are calling the new country Rhodesia, that is from the Transvaal to the southern end of Tanganyika; the other name is Zambesia. I find I am human and should like to be living after my death; still, perhaps, if that name is coupled with the object of England everywhere, and united, the name may convey the discovery of an idea which ultimately led to the cessation of all wars and one language throughout the world, the patent being the gradual absorption
FACSIMILE PAGES OF ONE OF MR. RHODES’S LETTERS TO W. T. STEAD.
of wealth and human minds of the higher order to the object.[1]
What an awful thought it is that if we had not lost America, or if even now we could arrange with the present members of the United States Assembly and our House of Commons, the peace of the world is secured for all eternity! We could hold your federal parliament five years at Washington and five at London. The only thing feasible to carry this idea out is a secret one (society) gradually absorbing the wealth of the world to be devoted to such an object. There is Hirsch with twenty millions, very soon to cross the unknown border, and struggling in the dark to know what to do with his money; and so one might go on ad infinitum.
Fancy the charm to young America, just coming on and dissatisfied—for they have filled up their own country and do not know what to tackle next—to share in a scheme to take the government of the whole world! Their present president is dimly seeing it, but his horizon is limited to the New World north and south, and so he would intrigue in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, to the exclusion of England. Such a brain wants but little to see the true solution; he is still groping in the dark, but is very near the discovery. For the American has been taught the lesson of Home Rule and the success of leaving the management of the local pump to the parish beadle. He does not burden his House of Commons with the responsibility of cleansing the parish drains. The present position in the English House is ridiculous. You might as well expect Napoleon to have found time to have personally counted his dirty linen before he sent it to the wash, and re-counted it upon its return. It would have been better for Europe if he had carried out his idea of Universal Monarchy; he might have succeeded if he had hit on the idea of granting self-government to the component parts. Still, I will own tradition, race, and diverse languages acted against his dream; all these do not exist as to the present English-speaking world, and apart from this union is the sacred duty of taking the responsibility of the still uncivilised parts of the world. The trial of these countries who have been found wanting—such as Portugal, Persia, even Spain—and the judgment that they must depart, and, of course, the whole of the South American Republics. What a scope and what a horizon of work, at any rate, for the next two centuries, the best energies of the best people in the world; perfectly feasible, but needing an organisation, for it is impossible for one human
Dr. Jameson.
atom to complete anything, much less such an idea as this requiring the devotion of the best souls of the next 200 years. There are three essentials: (1) The plan duly weighed and agreed to. (2) The first organisation. (3) The seizure of the wealth necessary.
I note with satisfaction that the committee appointed to inquire into the McKinley Tariff report that in certain articles our trade has fallen off 50 per cent., and yet the fools do not see that if they do not look out they will have England shut out and isolated with ninety millions to feed and capable internally of supporting about six millions. If they had had statesmen they would at the present moment be commercially at war with the United States, and they would have boycotted the raw products of the United States until she came to her senses. And I say this because I am a Free Trader. But why go on writing? Your people do not know their greatness; they possess a fifth of the world and do not know that it is slipping from them, and they spend their time on discussing Parnell and Dr. Tanner, the character of Sir C. Dilke, the question of compensation for beer-houses, and omne hoc genus. Your supreme question at the present moment is the seizure of the labour vote at the next election. Read the Australian Bulletin (New South Wales), and see where undue pandering to the labour vote may lead you; but at any rate the eight-hour question is not possible without a union of the English-speaking world, otherwise you drive your manufactures to Belgium, Holland, and Germany, just as you have placed a great deal of cheap shipping trade in the hands of Italy by your stringent shipping regulations which they do not possess, and so carry goods at lower rates.
Here this political Will and Testament abruptly breaks off. It is rough, inchoate, almost as uncouth as one of Cromwell’s speeches, but the central idea glows luminous throughout. Mr. Rhodes has never to my knowledge said a word, nor has he ever written a syllable, that justified the suggestion that he surrendered the aspirations which were expressed in this letter of 1891. So far from this being the case, in the long discussions which took place between us in the last years of his. life, he re-affirmed as emphatically as at first his unshaken conviction as to the dream—if you like to call it so—or vision, which had ever been the guiding star of his life. How pathetic to read to-day the thrice expressed foreboding that life would not be spared him to carry out his great ideal. But it may be as Lowell sang of Lamartine:—
Time was not granted? Aye in history,
Like that Dawn’s face which baffled Angelo,
Left shapeless, grander for its mystery,
Thy great Design shall stand, and day
Flood its blind front from Orients far away.
Cecil Rhodes as a boy.
(By kind permission of Wm. Blackwood and Sons.)
- ↑ Mr. Sidney Low, formerly editor of the St. James’s Gazette, writing in the Nineteenth Century for May, 1902, thus summarises the cardinal doctrines which formed the staple of Mr. Rhodes’s conversation with him:—“First, that insular England was quite insufficient to maintain, or even to protect, itself without the assistance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples beyond the seas of Europe. Secondly, that the first and greatest aim of British statesmanship should be to find new areas of settlement, and new markets for the products that would, in due course, be penalised in the territories and dependencies of all our rivals by discriminating tariffs. Thirdly, that the largest tracts of unoccupied or undeveloped lands remaining on the globe were in Africa, and therefore that the most strenuous efforts should be made to keep open a great part of that continent to British commerce and colonisation. Fourthly, that as the key to the African position lay in the various Anglo-Dutch States and provinces, it was imperative to convert the whole region into a united, self-governing federation, exempt from meddlesome interference by the home authorities, but loyal to the Empire, and welcoming British enterprise and progress. Fifthly, that the world was made for the service of man, and more particularly of civilised, white, European men, who were most capable of utilising the crude resources of Nature for the promotion of wealth and prosperity. And, finally, that the British Constitution was an absurd anachronism, and that it should be remodelled on the lines of the American Union, with federal self-governing Colonies as the constituent States.”