fields and pastures
new--in fact, to the country now known as Matabeleland. Its
inhabitants were then settled between the Limpopo and the Zambesi.
Here he again carried on his fell work of extermination. Of the
horrors of his triumphant progress nothing need be said. They are
best left to the imagination. It is enough to explain that the
tribes of the Makalas, Mashonas, and others that happened to be in
the way, were speedily wiped out. The Matabele, reigning in this
vast now almost desolate region, soon became the terror of other
tribes. The ravagers continued their fiendish operations, and
finally set up military kraals and installed their chief in the
principal of these at Buluwayo.

How long this state of things would have endured it is difficult to
say. Fortunately there appeared on the scene a man--The Man--who
conceived in his mighty brain a way to clear this Augean stable and
transform it into a comparative fairyland. Mr. Cecil Rhodes came--he
saw--and he conquered in all senses of the word. He decided that
British civilisation must be extended to this "hinter-land"--as the
Boers called it--and, being a keen man of the world and no
sentimentalist, he argued, moreover, that British civilisation might
be made to pay its way! The idea that Mr. Rhodes is "the walking
embodiment of an ideal," without personal ambition in his schemes,
is as absolutely absurd as are the reverse pictures that have been
painted of him. He is no angel and no ogre, Mr. Rhodes is one of
Nature's sovereigns, who, conscious of his power and the limitations
of human life, uses every minute at his disposal to write his name
large in the records of his country. And, since his name is large,
he wants as a natural consequence a large and clear area to write it
in, and that area he means to have!

[Illustration: MATABELELAND.]

Now, Mr. Rhodes had decided that the British were the best
administrators of South Africa, and that if the British shirked the task
it would be undertaken by some other nation. He saw the key to South
Africa in his hands--he saw the Boer overspreading his borders, he saw
Germans and Portuguese intriguing for footholds--there was but one
course open, and he followed it. On the 30th of November 1888,
Lobengula, the chief of the Matabele, signed a document giving the
British the right to search for and extract minerals in his territory.
Upon that the British South Africa Company was started. In 1889 a
charter was granted