Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/193

 on his work or on some fabric in his brain.' It was a life of vicissitude. There was camp fever, and other forms of epidemic, and during 1874 the reef fell in both in Colesberg Kopje and in De Beers, covering many claims under tons of shale. Floods prevailed, mining board taxation was heavy, there was constant litigation between claim holders and miners and the Griqualand West legislative council. Banks refused advances and bankruptcy was common. Many diggers left the fields, but Rhodes and his partners held on. Towards the end of October 1874 they successfully completed an undertaking to pump out Kimberley mine, and in 1876 they drained of water De Beers and Du Toit's Pan. A contemporary recalls how at a meeting of a mining board in 1876, when the members were 'fractious and impatient,' Rhodes, 'still quite a youth, was able to control that body of angry men.' As regards the diamond industry he, like his rival Bamato, already recognised that so long as individual diggers produced and threw upon the uncertain markets all the diamonds they could find, no real progress was possible, and that the remedy lay in an amalgamation of interests and the regulation of supply. To that end, but with different motives and ambitions, each was steadily working, Rhodes with De Beers mine, Bamato with Kimberley mine, as his base and nucleus. On 1 April 1880 the Rhodes group had established themselves as the De Beers Mining Company, with a capital of 200,000l., while in the same year the Bamato Mining Company was formed to work the richest claims in Kimberley mine.

But Rhodes's ambitions were from the first other than commercial. During 1875 he spent eight months m a solitary journey on foot or ox- wagon through Bechuanaland and the Transvaal. The experience helped to shape his aims. He found the country to be not merely of agricultural and of great mineral value, but also beautiful and healthy. The scattered Dutch farmers proved hospitable and he felt in sympathy with them. He aspired to work with the Dutch settlers and at the same time to secure the country for occupation by men of English blood and to make Great Britain the dominant influence in the governance of South Africa, and indeed of the world. In 1877 he had his first serious heart attack and made his first will, dated 19 Sept. 1877. The testator disposed of the fortune which he had not yet made to 'the establishment, promotion, and development of a Secret Society the aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour, and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the sea-board of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of colonial epresentation in the imperial Parliament, which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the empire, and finally the foundation of so great a power as hereafter to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.' The form and substance of these aspirations are youthful, but they dominated Rhodes's life. A federation of South Africa under British rule, with Cape Dutch assent, was always before his eyes. Just before leaving to graduate at Oxford in 1881 Rhodes had entered public life in South Africa. In 1880 the Act for absorbing Griqualand West in the Cape Colony created two electoral divisions at Kimberley and Barkly West. As one of two members for Barkly West, Rhodes was elected in 1880 and took his seat in the Cape legislature next year. (He retained the seat for life.) The battle of Majuba Hill on 27 Feb. 1881, with its sequel in the recognition anew of the independence of the Transvaal Republic, had just given an immense advantage to the Dutch claim to supremacy in the colony and had almost crushed the hope of a permanent British predominance. The foundation of the Afrikander Bond in 1882 was but one fruit of a Dutch national movement, in sympathy with the Boer republic, which looked forward to independence of the British Empire [see Hofmeyr, Jan Hendrik, Suppl. II]. In such unpromising conditions Rhodes entered Cape politics. His aim from the first was to maintain the widest powers of local self-government and at the same time to organise, confirm, and extend the area and force of British settlement and British infiuence, not by invoking the imperial factor, but by rousing in the average Briton a sense of the responsibilities of race and empire. In his first session he took a friend aside and, placing his hand on