"LEST WE FORGET!* 261

new dominion. In 1890 he launched his pioneers along the
northern road into the wilderness. In the next year, when he
could escape from his official dudes at the Cape, he followed
them on a visit along the fifteen hundred mile trek to their
primitive capital at Fort Salisbury.

In all that he had done Rhodes was animated by a single and
unchanging ambition: to found homes—"more homes1*—for
the race. His imagination never ceased to dwell on the future
shade of the trees he planted. He loved to think that the road
he made up Table Mountain would be used by men and women
of his race in a hundred years* time. It was not chance that
made him seek the friendship of General Booth and spend days
with him in the crowded London slums: the contrast between
the England of the utilitarians and the wider, freer England
of Rhodes's dream was his constant spur. The province which
he added to the Empire, and which later bore his name, was
equal in extent to Germany, France and" Spain together: a
country where free men could work and breed and make a new
English nation.

When Rhodes came back to England to seek for his projects
the support of Conservative, Liberal and Irish politicians, of
royal Dukes and journalists, of speculators and social reformers,
it was always with the same idea. Somehow he had got to save
the English future from the blindness of the English—"the
greatest people the world has seen whose fault is that they do
not know their strength, their greatness and their destiny.7*
"Mr. Gladstone," he is reported to have said, *the practical
reason for the further acquisition of territory is that every
power in the world, including our kinsmen the Americans, as
soon as they take new territory, place hostile tariffs against
British goods." In his speeches to the shareholders of his Chartered
Company, essays in imperial planning, he reverted again and
again to the nightmare that haunted him: that the prohibitive
tariffs of a hostile world would one day pauperise and perhaps
starve an island people who could not feed themselves:

"The classes can spend theirmoneyunder anyflag,but thepoor
masses... can only look to other countries in connection with
what they produce. Instead of the world going alright it
is all wrong for them. Cobden had his idea of Free Trade
fer all the world, but that idea has not been realised. The

E.S.

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