It was a slow and disheartening business at first, this building of a railway with a soul-inspiring name. The discovery of the diamond fields had already brought the line up to Kimberley; the finding of gold carried it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enterprise—the actual proof, as it were, of the British occupation. But the Boer War was scarcely over, the national purse was drained almost dry, and even the most optimistic financiers shrank from the enormous expense and problematical success of building a railway into the heart of a savage and unknown country. Finally Rhodes turned to the imperial government for assistance in this imperial enterprise, for the man who had added Zululand, Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, Barotseland, and Nyasaland to the empire felt that the empire owed him something in return. He first laid his scheme before Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, who said that nothing could be done until he had a closer estimate of the expense. Returning to Central Africa, Rhodes had a flying survey of the route made in double-quick time, and with the figures in his pocket hastened back to London. This time the premier sent him to see Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the chancellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach, who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure of national funds, was frigid and discouraging, but finally relaxed enough to say: “Get a proper survey made of your proposed railway, with estimates drawn up by responsible engineers, and if the figure is not too unreasonable we will see what can be done.” Fortified with this shred of hope, Rhodes again betook himself to the country north of the Zambezi, and, after months of work, hardship, and privation, facing death from native spears, poisonous snakes, and the sleeping-sickness, his men weakened by malaria and his animals killed by the dreaded tsetse-fly, he returned to England and presented his revised surveys and estimates to the chancellor of the exchequer. That immaculately clad statesman negligently twirled his eye-glass on its string as he regarded with obvious disfavour the fever-sunken cheeks and unkempt appearance of the pioneer. “Really, Mr. Rhodes,” he remarked coldly, “I fear it is quite out of the question for her Majesty's government to lend your scheme its countenance or assistance.” It is a pleasingly human touch that as the indignant empire-builder went out of the minister's room he slammed the door so that the pictures rattled on the wall.