Men Who Have Made the EmpireGriffith, George Chetwynd
History
Men Who Have Made the Empire
Griffith, George Chetwynd
Great Britain -- Biography
He is, in fact, as was plainly shown in that historic Indaba in the
Matoppos, the one white man in South Africa whom the natives
love and trust. It is not many men who, with millions enough to buy
everything that the world has to sell in the way of comfort and luxury
and honours--as distinguished from honour--who would have gone as
he did, armed only with a walking-stick, into the stronghold of the
Matabele, and there won from them the title of “the bull that separates
the fighting bulls,”--in other words, the peacemaker--and stopped a war
which, if the Imperial authorities had had their way, would have gone
on into the next year, and would have cost four or five millions at
least.
It is, by the way, characteristic of the strength of mind and fixity of
purpose of this man, that he solemnly warned Sir Richard Martin that,
if, after this, the war was continued, he would himself go and live
among the Matabele, and wash his hands of the whole affair.
It is noteworthy, too, that this man, whom Olive Schreiner describes by
the mouth of her impossible trooper as “death on niggers,” is, in the
opinion of the niggers themselves, the greatest friend they ever had.
If all the work of all the societies and associations of amiable old
ladies of both sexes for the Protection of the Aborigines and the
Elevation of the Savage were put together, it would not amount to a
tithe of what Cecil Rhodes has done for the natives of South Africa.
The Glen-Grey Act alone has almost emptied the prisons of kaffir
offenders, and as for his work at Kimberley, the effects of which I
have myself seen, it would be difficult to speak too highly of it.
Thus, for instance, it is not generally known that Cecil Rhodes is the
greatest practical temperance worker in the world. Every one knows that
the curse of all savage races in contact with civilised peoples is
liquor. When he was moving the second reading of the Glen-Grey Act he
said:
“I know the curse of liquor. Personally at the Diamond Fields I have
assisted in making ten thousand of these poor children hard-working
and sober. They are now in compounds, healthy and happy. In their
former condition the place was a hell upon earth, therefore my heart is
thoroughly with the idea of removing liquor from the natives.”
I have myself seen “these poor children” happy, healthy, and sober,
in the compounds of Kimberley. In the Transvaal and the Portuguese
territory I have seen them drunken, degraded, and diseased, and I am in
a position to say that every word of the above quotation is solid fact.
I wonder how many of our professional temperance agitators could point
to such a splendid achievement as that.
It seems, perhaps, a good deal to say of Cecil Rhodes that, not only
has he enormously increased our area of empire in South Africa, but
that he is the only man who can efficiently protect that empire from
the two greatest dangers which threaten it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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