"lest   we   forget!"	265
Dutch in essence than English, No! The Dutch are as vigorous
and unconquered to-day as they have ever been; the country is
still as much theirs as it is yours, and you will have to live and
work with them hereafter as in the past. Remember that when
you go back to your homes in the towns or in the up-country
farms and villages. Let there be no vaunting words, no vulgar
triumph over,your Dutch neighbours; make them feel that
bitterness is past and that the need of co-operation is greater
than ever. Teach your children to remember when they go to
their village school that the little Dutch boys and girls they find
sitting on the same benches with them are as much part of the
South African nation as they are themselves, and that as they
learn the same lessons together now, so hereafter they must
work together as comrades for a common object—the good of
South Africa.**
Rhodes's last recorded words were, ^aSo little done: so much
to do.^9* He was only 49 when he died. Had he lived another
twelve years, he might conceivably, by his strength and com-
manding influence in the Anglo-Saxon world, have made it
dear in the summer of 1914 that the Empire would intervene
against an aggressor and so have averted the Great War and all
its incalculable consequences. Had he lived till now, like his
contemporary, Bernard Shaw, it is even possible that his full
dream might have been realised, the "Anglo-Saxon schism" be
ended and the peace and economic unity of mankind permanently
secured by the establishment of a pacific world power as
omnipotent as Rome. The Fates willed it otherwise*
•	•••••*•
It was an English politician who took up Rhodes's work
where he had left it half shattered at the end of 1895. In that
year Joseph Chamberlain became Colonial Secretary. It was an
office about which no one had troubled much before. For eight
years Chamberlain made it the most important in the Empire.
He reconquered the Sudan,^1 which during the Mahdi's rule had
lost three-quarters of its population, and established a British
province twenty times .the size of England in the heart of
equatorial Africa. He transferred the rule of the vast country
which is to-day called Nigeria from the Royal Niger Company
to the imperial crown. He secured, by a war in which Australians,
Canadians and New Zealanders fought side by side with English-
^1 General Kitchener the Sirdar, annihilated the Mahdi at Omdunnan in 1898.