The fact is, that the known world is fast filling up. It may be that Nature is preparing some colossal cataclysm for the destruction of this civilisation, just as she has done for the subversion of others; but, for the present, what those who have looked over the farmyard wall have to consider is the fact that vastly improved conditions of life in the older countries of the world have, with the sole and ominous exception of France, had their inevitable result in a vast increase of population, and that meanwhile, for the last three hundred years or so, the available portions of the world have been getting discovered, and filled up according to their capacity of sustenance. It is not, therefore, a merely predatory instinct, or a felonious desire to go and steal away from the gentle savage those lands which he is mostly accustomed to use as battlefields, that sends out the pioneer to the uttermost ends of the earth. It is that ineradicable instinct planted deep in all healthy human nature to get elbow-room, and behind this instinct there is the necessity which Providence provided against when it gave us this instinct, and that is the necessity of getting out of a place that is overcrowded, into some other where muscles and brains can get a better chance. It is probable, too, that that widespread passion which we are accustomed to call “land-hunger” has been given to us in order to compel us to carry out the vast scheme of human progress under the impression that we are benefiting ourselves. Of course, as a rule, we do benefit ourselves, but it is reserved for the few to see that greater Purpose which we are fulfilling at the same time that we are serving ourselves, and of all the men who ever lived no one has seen this more clearly than Cecil Rhodes. Accident and weak lungs took him to Africa--that is to say to the only continent in which it is yet possible for the British Empire to be increased without violating the territory of some already established and recognised Power, more or less civilised. Like Nelson and Warren Hastings, he came of a clerical stock. If it had not been for those weak lungs of his it is possible that he might have passed through a distinguished career at Oxford, and either entered the church, or gone into business--probably the latter--but in either case the map of South Africa would have looked very different to what it does to-day.