In one respect he presents a very strong and striking contrast to our other Empire-Makers. Francis Drake went on his filibustering expeditions, looted plate-ships, and sacked towns, no doubt with a worthy intention of hurting the Queen’s enemies, but also with a very definite idea of making money. John Hawkins started the Slave Trade for the same reason; so too that East India Company which made it possible for Clive and Warren Hastings to do their work, was in its beginnings a money-making concern, and little else. It will be remembered, for instance, how Warren Hastings was grievously hampered in his empire-making by the incessant demands of his directors for money. Now the distinctive fact of Cecil Rhodes’s career is that he started the other way. The first solid and salient fact that he appears to have grasped in those old days in the early seventies, when he used to sit under the burning African sun at a rough deal table picking diamonds out from the yellow earth as it was brought by his kaffirs from the old Kimberley mine, was the transcendent and almost irresistible power of money. In Drake’s day valour and endurance were used to earn money in the first case, or, if the reader prefers it, to steal money or its equivalent. This was well enough in its way, and the British Empire would have got on rather badly without it, but Cecil Rhodes appears to have had an inspiration on this subject of the sort which only comes to men of real genius. He seems to have said to himself: “How would it be to earn the money first in thousands, in hundreds of thousands, in millions if possible, and then use it to employ in more legitimate work the same valour and enthusiasm which are just as conspicuous British qualities now as they were in the days of Queen Elizabeth?” It is quite possible that, being an Oxford undergraduate, he remembered the famous aphorism of Horace: “Honestly if possible--but still make it.” There may have been some of his transactions which if submitted to the legal scrutiny, say, of the Lord Chief Justice, would possibly move him to another exhibition of that “unctuous rectitude” such as that with which he, the sometime forensic defender of traitors and sedition-mongers, outpoured on Dr. Jameson and his comrades. I have heard stories of the sort myself in Kimberley and elsewhere in South Africa, but what of that? There are a good many things in our history that it would be difficult to defend on moral grounds, and yet without them we should have little or no history at all. There are several of Cecil Rhodes’s own sayings on record which show clearly the light in which he looked upon large quantities of money not merely as money, not as vulgar riches, but as an indispensable means to an exalted end. He was with Gordon in that sadly futile expedition of his to Basutoland, and during one of their conversations Gordon told him how he had been offered a roomful of gold as a reward for his services in China.