him still farther. His dreams of political
work began to take shape when Griqualand was created a British province
in 1880. Two electoral divisions were formed, Kimberley and Barkly West;
and it was for the latter that Rhodes first took his seat in the Cape
Parliament in 1880, a seat which he retained till his death. The Prime
Minister was Sir Gordon Sprigg, a politician with experience but few
ideas, more skilled in retaining office than in formulating a policy.
Rhodes was at first reticent about his own projects, and spent his time
quietly studying commercial questions, examining the problem of the
native races and making friends among the Boers. If these friendships
were obscured later by political quarrels, there is no reason to suspect
their genuineness. His sympathy with the Dutch farmers had begun in
1872, when he made a long, lonely trek through the Northern Transvaal,
and it lasted through life. He was interested in farming, he liked
natural men, and was at home in unconventional surroundings. One of the
closest observers of his character said that to see the true Rhodes you
must see him on the veld. So long as the supremacy of the British flag
was assured, there was nothing that he so ardently desired as friendly
relations between British and Dutch, a real union of the races, a South
African nation. It was for this that he worked so long with Jan Hofmeyr,
leader of the Cape Dutch, and earned so many unfair suspicions from the
short-sighted politicians of Cape Town.

Hofmeyr was a curious man. He had a great understanding of the Dutch
character and a great power of influencing men; but this was not done by
parliamentary eloquence. By one satirist he was called 'the captain who
never appeared on the bridge'; by another he was nicknamed 'the Mole',
because his activity could only be conjectured from the tracks which he
left behind him. A third name current in Cape Town, 'the Blind Man,' was
an ironical tribute to his exceptional astuteness in politics. His organ
was 'the Afrikander Bond', a society formed partly for agricultural,
partly for political purposes, a creature which like a chameleon has
often changed its colour, sometimes working peacefully beside British
politicians, at other times openly conducting an anti-British agitation.
He certainly had no enthusiasm for the British flag, but he probably
realized the freedom which the Colony enjoyed under it, and was clear of
all disloyalty to the Crown. The poli