leading the world
successfully than any other, he had resolved that it should be his
life's business to forward and increase the influence of British ideas
and of British modes of life; and he had systematically built up a
colossal fortune in order that he might have the means to do this work.
At the roots of this strange medley of poetry and chauvinism which
filled his mind was an unchanging and deep veneration for the
outstanding memory of his youth, Oxford, which in his mind stood for
all the august venerable past of England, and was the expression of her
moral essence. When he died, after a life of money-making and intrigue,
in a remote and half-developed colony, it was found that most of his
immense fortune had been left either to enrich the college where he had
spent a short time as a lad, or to bring picked youths from all the
British lands, and from what he regarded as the two great sister
communities of America and Germany, so that they might drink in the
spirit of England, at Oxford, its sanctuary.

His immediate task lay in South Africa, where, from the moment of his
entry upon public life, he became the leader of the British cause as
Kruger was the leader of the Dutch: millionaire-dreamer and shrewd,
obstinate farmer, they form a strange contrast. The one stood for South
African unity based upon equality of the white races: the other also
for unity, but for unity based upon the ascendancy of one of the white
races. In the politics of Cape Colony Rhodes achieved a remarkable
success: he made friends with the Dutch party and its leader Hofmeyr,
who for a long time gave steady support to his schemes and maintained
him in the premiership. It was a good beginning for the policy of
racial co-operation. But Rhodes's most remarkable achievement was the
acquisition of the fertile upland regions of Mashonaland and
Matabililand, now called Rhodesia in his honour. There were episodes
which smelt of the shady practices of high finance in the events which
led up to this acquisition. But in the result its settlement was well
organised, after some initial difficulties, by the Chartered Company
which Rhodes formed for the purpose. Now one important result of the
acquisition of Rhodesia was that it hemmed in the Transvaal on the
north; and, joined with the earlier annexation of Bechuanaland,
isolated and insulated the two Dutch republics, which were now
surrounded, everywhere except on the east, by British territory. From
Ca