WE FORGET!" 259

What was extraordinary was the speed and consistency with
which Rhodes put them into practice. In an age when money
had become power, he decided that nothing could be achieved
without cash—"the needful," as he called it. He proceeded
to make himself the richest man in the Empire. At 27 he
founded the De Beers Mining Company with a capital of £200,000.
Within eight years he was dictator of the South African diamond
industry. Six years later, at the age of 41, he had achieved a
similar position in the new gold-mining industry of the
Johannesburg Rand.

His enormous wealth, and the power it gave him, Rhodes did
not devote to personal or vulgar ends. Seeking, as he expressed
it, to combine the commercial and the imaginative, he still
pursued his dream. To his contemporaries there was something
staggering, and to many even incredible, in the spectacle of a
nineteenth-century speculator " spending the profits of a mining
company on the development of an empire." Yet this was pre-
cisely what Rhodes did, "And the fun is," he loved to say, "we
make Beit pay!" But his friend Alfred Beit, hard-headed Hebrew
and shrewd financier as he was, never grudged a penny.
He knew Rhodes, honoured his vision and loved him; and his
devoted service to Rhodes's ideal continued after death,

"The friend he loved he served through good and ill,
The man struck down, he served his memory still,
• Nor toiling asked more recompense of fame
Than to be coupled with another's name."

As part of the task he had set himself Rhodes entered Cape
politics. His success was as dazzling as in business: there seemed
no resisting his energy and charm. At 36 he became Prime
Minister of the Cape Colony. He had two objects: the expansion
of British rule into the northern hinterland, and the union of
British and Dutch in a federal South Africa.

To gain the first he had to fight against time. The early
'eighties saw the last scramble of the European Powers, all fast
industrialising themselves, for unclaimed lands of settlement
which might afford them raw materials and new markets. The
African interior, recently opened by the missionary explorations
of men like Livingstone, offered tie last unoccupied territories
of size in the world. To the north-western deserts of South