Cecil Rhodes | Page 3

it would have
been impossible for the vast South African territories to become

federated into a Union of its own and at the same time to take her place
as a member of another Empire from which it derived its prosperity and
its welfare. The grandeur of England and the soundness of its leaders
has never come out in a more striking manner than in this conquest of
South Africa--a blood-stained conquest which has become a love
match.
During the concluding years of last century the possibility of union was
seldom taken into consideration; few, indeed, were clever enough and
wise enough to find out that it was bound to take place as a natural
consequence of the South African War. The war cleared the air all over
South Africa. It crushed and destroyed all the suspicious, unhealthy
elements that had gathered around the gold mines of the Transvaal and
the diamond fields of Cape Colony. It dispersed the coterie of
adventurers who had hastened there with the intention of becoming
rapidly rich at the expense of the inhabitants of the country. A few men
had succeeded in building for themselves fortunes beyond the dreams
of avarice, whilst the majority contrived to live more or less well at the
expense of those naïve enough to trust to them in financial matters until
the day when the war arrived to put an end to their plunderings.
The struggle into which President Kruger was compelled to rush was
expected by some of the powerful intriguers in South Africa to result in
increasing the influence of certain of the millionaires, who up to the
time when the war broke out had ruled the Transvaal and indirectly the
Cape Colony by the strength and importance of their riches. Instead, it
weakened and then destroyed their power. Without the war South
Africa would have grown more wicked, and matters there were bound
soon to come to a crisis of some sort. The crux of the situation was
whether this crisis was going to be brought about by a few
unscrupulous people for their own benefit, or was to arise in
consequence of the clever and far-seeing policy of wise politicians.
Happily for England, and I shall even say happily for the world at large,
such a politician was found in the person of the then Sir Alfred Milner,
who worked unselfishly toward the grand aim his far-sighted
Imperialism saw in the distance.

History will give Viscount Milner--as he is to-day--the place which is
due to him. His is indeed a great figure; he was courageous enough,
sincere enough, and brave enough to give an account of the difficulties
of the task he had accepted. His experience of Colonial politics was
principally founded on what he had seen and studied when in Egypt
and in India, which was a questionable equipment in the entirely new
areas he was called upon to administer when he landed in Table Bay.
Used to Eastern shrewdness and Eastern duplicity, he had not had
opportunity to fight against the unscrupulousness of men who were
neither born nor brought up in the country, but who had grown to
consider it as their own, and exploited its resources not only to the
utmost, but also to the detriment of the principles of common honesty.
The reader must not take my words as signifying a sweeping
condemnation of the European population of South Africa. On the
contrary, there existed in that distant part of the world many men of
great integrity, high principles and unsullied honour who would never,
under any condition whatsoever, have lent themselves to mean or
dishonest action; men who held up high their national flag, and who
gave the natives a splendid example of all that an Englishman could do
or perform when called upon to maintain the reputation of his Mother
Country abroad.
Some of the early English settlers have left great remembrance of their
useful activity in the matter of the colonisation of the new continent to
which they had emigrated, and their descendants, of whom I am happy
to say there are a great number, have not shown themselves in any way
unworthy of their forbears. South Africa has its statesmen and
politicians who, having been born there, understand perfectly well its
necessities and its wants. Unfortunately, for a time their voices were
crushed by the new-comers who had invaded the country, and who
considered themselves better able than anyone else to administer its
affairs. They brought along with them fresh, strange ambitions,
unscrupulousness, determination to obtain power for the furtherance of
their personal aims, and a greed which the circumstances in which they
found themselves placed was bound to develop into something even
worse than a vice, because it made light of human life as well as of

human