Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of Cæsars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands midway between Napoleon and the force-men of the next centuries, just as Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to undertake the subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the policy of colonial expansion, stands between Alexander and Cæsar. Strictly speaking, Flaminius was a private person—for his real power was of a kind not embodied in any constitutional office—who exercised a dominant influence in the state at a time when the state-idea was giving way to the pressure of economic factors. So far as Rome is concerned, he was the archetype of opposition Cæsarism; with him there came to an end the _idea of state-service_ and there began the “will to power” which ignored traditions and reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though they stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Cæsar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding. But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and financial success, and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself he was fully aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape in such strength and purity as this. It was only before his maps that he could fall into a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage who, sent out to South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune and employed it as the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African empire, his intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining magnates whose wealth he forced into the service of his schemes, his capital Bulawayo, royally planned as a future Residence by a statesman who was all- powerful yet stood in no definite relation to the State, his wars, his diplomatic deals, his road-systems, his syndicates, his armies, his conception of the “great duty to civilization” of the man of brain—all this, broad and imposing, is the prelude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the history of West-European mankind will be definitely _closed_. He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing _this_ and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to _this_ destiny or despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages— must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or to make history.