"LEST WE FORGET!" 257

his countrymen to the empire they had neglected or taken for
granted was not a writer. Cecil Rhodes was born on the 5th
July, 1853, the fifth son of a Hertfordshire vicarage. He was
one of a line of small gentry and yeomen farmers: his forbears,
he loved to boast, kept cows at Islington.

Though his elder brothers went to Eton and Winchester, the
family resources restricted Cecil to the local grammar schooL
When he was sixteen, having developed a tendency to consump-
tion, he was sent to join an elder brother on a Natal cotton farm.
On a summer's day in 1870 he landed at Durban—a shy, tall,
fair-headed lad, as lonely as Robert Clive at his first coming to
Madras.

After a year of unsuccessful farming he followed his brother
across the high veld to the new diamond diggings at Kimberley.
Here he spent the next two years in a crazy community of rough
diggers from every corner of the earth, Jewish speculators and
native labourers; mud holes, mud slides, refuse dumps and tin
roofs. In this school he learnt to know mankind.

As the youthful Kipling was impressed by the alternate scenes
of England and India—the little, crowded, fog-bound island and
the vast glittering empire it ruled by force of character—so
Rhodes responded to the mining camp of Dutoitspan. He came
back to England to complete his education with a profound
sense of the honesty, kindliness and courage of the ordinary
Englishman. While at Oxford, paying his fees by periodic visits
to the diggings, he conceived a burning desire to further the
expansion of his race. It was at the rime that Ruskin, as
Slade Professor, was firing the imagination of a new generation
of undergraduates by lectures on their country's destiny, telling
them that they were still undegenerate in race and blood, not
yet dissolute in temper, with the firmness to govern and the
grace to obey. "Will you youths of England,15 he asked, "make
your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for
all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress df
learning and of the Arts, faithful guardian of time-tried
principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licen-
tious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of
the nations, worshipped in her strange valour of goodwill
towards men?.., This is what England must either do or perish.
She must find colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed
of her most energetic and worthiest -men; seizing any piece