“And you mean to say you didn’t take it?” said Rhodes, possibly with some doubt of the great Crusader’s sanity in his mind. “No, I didn’t,” said Gordon. “I didn’t feel altogether justified in doing so. I had been paid already for what I’d done.” “I should have taken it, and as many more roomfuls as they would have given me,” said Rhodes, without hesitation. “Just think how much more you could have done with it. It’s no use for us to have big ideas if we have not got the money to carry them out.” That was Cecil Rhodes. He didn’t say: “Think how much it would have come to,” or “How rich a man it would have made you,” or even “What you would have been able to buy with it,” but “What you could _do_ with it.” Those who call Cecil Rhodes a money-grabber, a financial schemer, and all the rest of it, might learn something from that conversation were they not as they are. There is no doubt but that he first of all devoted himself body and soul to the making of money, and yet in the meanwhile he must have been slowly shaping this Ideal of his. Early in the eighties he was talking about South Africa generally with a friend, and during the course of the conversation he pointed to the map and said: “There! All English! That’s my dream.” And all English it would have been if it had not been for the stupidity, the ignorance, and the cowardice of the vote-hunters in Downing Street, who were afraid to be worried with the cares, though they had no objection to avail themselves of the honours and profits of empire-making. It is a favourite theory of my own that no man ought to be allowed to sit either in the House of Lords or the House of Commons unless he has been at least once round the world and visited the greater part of the British Empire. If this had been the rule during the present reign, I am perfectly certain that, whether by purchase, conquest, or colonisation, the whole of Africa from the Zambesi to the Cape would now be coloured red, and there would probably have been a red streak stretching from Cairo _viâ_ Khartoum to the shores of Lake Tanganyka. In one of his speeches, Cecil Rhodes aptly described South Africa as the Cinderella of the British Colonies, and this is perfectly true. There is hardly a single instance in which Downing Street has not tried to lose what every one now recognises as of almost priceless importance. Thus, for instance, in 1872 Lord Kimberley might have bought Delagoa Bay, “the keyhole of Africa,” for the paltry amount of twelve or fifteen thousand pounds and he refused the bargain. It would be cheap now at ten millions. Unfortunately, as his biographer aptly puts it, there was no Cecil Rhodes then to find the money out of his own pocket. He was still sitting on a bucket and sorting diamonds in Kimberley.