258 ENGL1SHSAGA

of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there
teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to
their country___If we can get men, for little pay, to cast them-
selves against cannon mouths for love of England, we may find
men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave
kindly and righteously for her, and who will bring up their
children to love her. . . .*

Rhodes did not doubt Ruskin's message. He linked it to his
own experience, and to the healthy, empty uplands of the South
African hinterland which he had seen on his travels—lands where
Englishmen could live, labour and multiply without injury to
others. To win those lands for England and to awaken the
imagination of his countrymen to their possibilities was to be
his life's work. He went further. Since the English at their best
almost alone possessed the three attributes which seemed to him to
express most nearly the divine will—a sense of justice, a respect
for liberty and a love of peace—the next stage in human evolution
could best be accomplished through the peaceful expansion of
the Anglo Saxon race. Like Milton, Rhodes held that if God
wanted a thing done He sent for his Englishman.

With the crazy arrogance of youth he began to preach
his greed while still at Oxford. With debts pouring in and the
pump on his daim in the flooded diggings at Kimberley breaking
down, he drew up a will—the first of many—in which he left a
still non-existent fortune to found a secret society to spread the
British rule into every unclaimed part of the earth where
white men could live by their own labour. The whole Anglo-
Saxon race was comprised in his grandiose dream; there was to
be an end to the eighteenth-century "schism," a reunion, if
necessary under the Stars and Stripes, complete freedom and
self-government for every part of the vast commonwealth so
formed, an imperial parliament and internal free trade. This
great achievement in human co-operation would guarantee the
permanent peace of the world "I contend," he wrote, "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 provides for the birth of more of the
English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.
Added to which the absorption of the greater portion of the world
under our rule simply means the end of all wars."

There was nothing unusual in a young man dreaming dreams.