axation upon the gold industry and the people who
conducted it; and out of the proceeds he was able not only to pay the
expenses of government without burdening the Boer farmers, but to build
up the military power by means of which he hoped ultimately to carry
out his great project. Thus the 'Uitlanders' found themselves treated
as an inferior race in the land which their industry was enriching.
They practically paid the cost of the government, but had no share in
directing it.

The policy of racial ascendancy has seldom been pursued in a more
mischievous or dangerous form. One cannot but feel a certain sympathy
with the Boers' desire to maintain Boer ascendancy in the land which
they had conquered. Yet it must be remembered that they were themselves
very recent immigrants: the whole settlement of the Transvaal had taken
place in Paul Kruger's lifetime.

The diamonds and the gold of the recent discoveries had produced in
South Africa a new element of power: the power of great wealth, wielded
by a small number of men. Some of these were, of course, mean and
sordid souls, to whom wealth was an end in itself. But among them one
emerged who was more than a millionaire, who was capable of dreaming
great dreams, and had acquired his wealth chiefly in order that he
might have the power to realise them. This was Cecil Rhodes, an almost
unique combination of the financier and the idealist. If he was
sometimes tempted to resort to the questionable devices that high
finance seems to cultivate, and if his ideals took on sometimes a
rather vulgar colour, reflected from his money-bags, nevertheless
ideals were the real governing factors in his life.

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