In 1888 he again opened the flood gates of Imperialism, and secured by means of a treaty with Lobengula the reversion of the native territory north of the Transvaal, at which two European nations were nibbling, and which in his honour received the name of Rhodesia. He became Premier of the Cape Colony in 1890 by the help of the Dutch vote and from that time gradually sank from the zenith of his success. His good fortune left him when he attained his ambition. The Jameson Raid, for which he was not personally, though he confessed himself morally, responsible, ended his political career. His last good service to the Empire was given during the Matabele rising. He accompanied the troops sent to suppress the rebellion; and when the operations seemed likely to be indefinitely prolonged, he brought it to an end by going fearlessly and almost unattended among the natives, whose confidence he won by meeting them trustfully in council and listening to their grievances. His physical vitality, always inadequate, was seriously impaired by the strain of the siege. He never fully recovered his strength and he died on March 26, 1902, two months before the Second Boer war was brought to a close by the Vereeniging Treaty. He was a rich but honest man, and the great wealth which he amassed never led him to attach undue importance to the possession of it. He valued it not for his own advantage, but for its help in advancing his political and imperial schemes. He employed it creditably and without ostentation, and spent none of it in social display in London. By his will he left the greater portion of it to the University of Oxford for the establishment of an amiable if somewhat quixotic system of bringing the various branches of the Anglo-Saxon race into association at a centre of learning and athletics, where they were to be leavened by a Teutonic admixture. The vision of posthumous reputation allured him, and he delighted in the hope that the name of his own Rhodesia, like the cities which still bear the name of Alexander, would be on the lips of men of generations as far distant from his own as his own was from the days of the Great Macedonian. He presented a pair of sculptured lions to President Kruger. Almost on the eve of the war he asserted confidently that Kruger would not fight. It is probable that this was not his belief, but that it was said in order to provoke the President into rejecting the overtures of the British Government, and to make inevitable the war which he foresaw was the only way of settling the South African question.