In such a vast country as South Africa--how big it is may be guessed from the comparison between it and England on the map--the first requisite for advancing civilisation is a road, the next a telegraph, and the next is a railway, and the absolute necessity of these to the new domain that he was making for Britain was of course plainly apparent to such a man as Cecil Rhodes. His dream, which, if he lives long enough, he will certainly realise, is the making of that British high road from Cairo to Cape Town which Gordon, but for the baseness which betrayed him to his death, would certainly now be helping to make from the other end. Therefore when there was a shortness of money for the making of the railway to Mafeking, and for carrying the telegraph up through Rhodesia and northward across the Zambesi, the deficiency was supplied out of the capacious pockets of the man who, if he had only had the chance, would have been so glad to give that £12,000 for Delagoa Bay, and who knows Africa well enough to see that with its rinderpest, its locusts, and its horse-sickness, it stands in more need of mechanical transit and communication than any other part of the world. When the extension of the Beira railway became necessary Cecil Rhodes, by the sheer force of his own character, persuaded Lord Rothschild to put down £25,000, every penny of which the great financier believed was going to be “chucked into the sea.” His Lordship probably thinks differently now. Perhaps the most salient feature in the contemporary history of South Africa is the silent but ceaseless struggle for mastery which is going on, and has been going on for years, between Cecil Rhodes and Paul Krüger. There are some people who say that there are only two men in South Africa. In the political sense this is probably true. So far, with the single exception, perhaps, of the Jameson Raid and the consequences which the weakness of our officials abroad and the cowardice of our government at home made so deplorable, the enlightened Englishman has scored at every move over the dishonest cunning of the ignorant Dopper. He prevented him joining hands with the Germans across Bechuanaland, he stopped his raid into Matabeleland, he got his raiders stopped on the confines of Amatongaland--and so destroyed his cherished dream of a Transvaal seaboard--and, worse than all, he has made Rhodesia a so much better place even for Dutchmen to live in than the Transvaal, that the Boers are every day treking through the drifts of the Limpopo to live on British soil and under British rule--that of Paul Krüger and his German and Hollander hangers-on becoming impossible for self-respecting men to submit to just as fast as their avarice and stupidity can make it so. Both these men have their dreams. Paul Krüger is not the sort of person whom any one would associate with an ideal. Still he has got one. It is a United States of South Africa, under what he is pleased to consider republican rule.