ted to the gold fields of Johannesburg all those whom they were to
enrich or to ruin. Without the association and glamour of Rhodes' name,
too, this area could never have acquired the political importance it
possessed in the few years which preceded, and covered, the Boer War.
Rhodes' was the mind which, after bringing about the famous Amalgamation
of the diamond mines around Kimberley, then conceived the idea of turning
a private company into a political instrument of a power which would
control public opinion and public life all over South Africa more
effectually even than the Government. This organisation had its own agents
and spies and kept up a wide system of secret service. Under the pretext
of looking out for diamond thieves, these emissaries in reality made it
their duty to report on the private opinions and doings of those whose
personality inspired distrust or apprehension.

This organisation was more a dictatorship than anything else, and had
about it something at once genial and Mephistophelian. The conquest of
Rhodesia was nothing in comparison with the power attained by this
combine, which arrogated to itself almost unchallenged the right to
domineer over every white man and to subdue every coloured one in the
whole of the vast South African Continent. Rhodesia, indeed, was only
rendered possible through the power wielded in Cape Colony to bring the
great Northward adventure to a successfully definite issue.

In referring to Rhodesia, I am reminded of a curious fact which, so far as
I am aware, has never been mentioned in any of the biographies of Mr.
Rhodes, but which, on the contrary, has been carefully concealed from the
public knowledge by his admirers and his satellites. The concession
awarded by King Lobengula to Rhodes and to the few men who together with
him took it upon themselves to add this piece of territory to the British
Empire had, in reality, already been given by the dusky monarch--long
before the ambitions of De Beers had taken that direction--to a Mr.
Sonnenberg, a German Jew who had very quickly amassed a considerable
fortune in various speculations. This Mr. Sonnenberg--who was subsequently
to represent the Dutch party in the Cape Parliament, and who became one of
the foremost members of the Afrikander Bond--during one of his journeys
into the interior of the country from Basutoland, where he resided for
some time, had taken the opportunity of a visit to Matabeleland to obtain
a conce