The Expansion of Europe; The Culmination of Modern HistoryMuir, Ramsay
History
The Expansion of Europe; The Culmination of Modern History
Muir, Ramsay
Colonization -- History; Europe -- History -- 1492-; World politics
He dreamed of a great united state of South Africa; it was to be a
British South Africa; but it was to be British, not in the sense in
which Kruger wished it to be Dutch, but in the sense that equality of
treatment between the white races should exist within it, as in all the
British lands. He dreamed also of a great brotherhood of British
communities, or communities governed by British ideals, girdling the
world, perhaps dominating it (for Rhodes was inclined to be a
chauvinist), and leading it to peace and liberty. As a lad fresh from
Oxford, in long journeyings over the African veldt, he had in a
curious, childlike way thought out a theology, a system of politics,
and a mode of life for himself; having reached the conclusion that the
British race had on the whole more capacity for leading the world
successfully than any other, he had resolved that it should be his
life's business to forward and increase the influence of British ideas
and of British modes of life; and he had systematically built up a
colossal fortune in order that he might have the means to do this work.
At the roots of this strange medley of poetry and chauvinism which
filled his mind was an unchanging and deep veneration for the
outstanding memory of his youth, Oxford, which in his mind stood for
all the august venerable past of England, and was the expression of her
moral essence. When he died, after a life of money-making and intrigue,
in a remote and half-developed colony, it was found that most of his
immense fortune had been left either to enrich the college where he had
spent a short time as a lad, or to bring picked youths from all the
British lands, and from what he regarded as the two great sister
communities of America and Germany, so that they might drink in the
spirit of England, at Oxford, its sanctuary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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