Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/195

 proclaiming as he did all Boer farms in Bechuanaland to be the property of the British government, and otherwise making too much of the imperial authority. The resident was recalled by the high commissioner, nominally for the purpose of conference, and Rhodes replaced him, by the style of deputy-commissioner. Reaching Rooi-Grand in Goshen, the lesser of the two Boer centres, on 25 August, he found Grenerals Joubert and Delarey just arrived from the Transvaal, and armed burghers preparing that night to advance on Mafeking and on Montsoia the local chief. All Rhodes could do was to warn the Boers that, in view of the convention, they were making war, in effect, on the British government, and that done, to retire on the larger concentration in Stellaland. Arriving at Commando Drift on 1 September, he went straight to the house of the Boer commandant. Van Niekirk, who had refused to acknowledge Mackenzie as resident. He informed Rhodes that 'blood must flow.' Rhodes replied 'Give me my breakfast and let us see to that afterwards.' Having dismounted, he stayed with Van Niekirk six weeks, and became godfather to his child. By 8 September he had recognised the titles of individual Boer settlers and reported to the high commissioner that the armed burghers had dispersed and that Stellaland had accepted the flag. But the return of Joubert to Pretoria was followed by a proclamation of President Kruger on 16 September, annexing the Mafeking region and so cutting off Cape Colony from access northwards. The imperial government moved. Sir Charles Warren's expeditionary force was sent to patrol Bechuanaland and the Transvaal frontier, and by 14 Feb. 1885 President Kruger met the general and Rhodes at Fourteen Streams in peaceful conference. This was the first meeting between Rhodes and Kruger, who henceforth typified for Rhodes the force which his policy of expansion might yet encounter. Bechuanaland south of the Milopo, with the Kalahari, now became part of the Cape Colony, while the territory to the north was constituted a protectorate. The expansion was thus at once both imperial and colonial, or colonial under imperial sanction, the ideal alike of Rhodes and of Sir Hercules Robinson. The high commissioner's despatches {Bechuanaland Blue Book C. 4432) testify how much the intervention and influence of Rhodes in keeping the country quiet, and insisting that the title of Stellalanders should not be cancelled nor the susceptibilities of Kruger and his officers wounded by too much military parade, conduced to this result. The despatch of Lord Derby, the colonial secretary (No. 17 of September 1886), took the same view.

But Rhodes had no security that in the coveted hinterland itself the Transvaal and Germany might not combine against England. Germany's acquisition in the south-west had been followed by an attempt — frustrated by the governor of Natal — to occupy St. Lucia Bay in Zululand on the east. The Transvaal, while refusing customs and railway union with the Cape, on which Rhodes counted to smooth the way to federation, and seeking, though vainly, from President Brand an alliance defensive and offensive with the Orange Free State, had given German capitalists an exclusive right to construct railways within the republic, at a sensible cost to British prestige. The fear of such a conjunction was quickened by the discovery of gold on Witwatersrand in 1886, when the Transvaal leapt from beggary to wealth and importance. North of the twenty-second parallel meanwhile was the dominion of Lobengula, the able king of the warlike Matabele, and Boer and German emissaries were reported as coming and going about Gobulawayo, the king's kraal. Late in 1887 Kruger, in defiance of a convention signed at Pretoria on 11 June of that year, confirming the delimitation of Transvaal boundaries, sent up Piet Grobelaar with the title of consul to arrange terms with the Matabele king. Rhodes was apprised, and hurrying from Kimberley to Cape Town besought the high commissioner to proclaim a formal protectorate over the northern territories. The high commissioner declined this step on his own responsibility, but, acting on an alternative suggestion, sent the Rev. John Smith Moffat, assistant-commissioner of Bechuanaland, to Lobengula, and on 11 Feb. 1888 the king entered into a treaty which boimd him to alienate no part of his country ^dthout the knowledge and sanction of the high commissioner. True to his principle, Rhodes looked first to the sinews of war, and while still hoping for annexation by the imperial government, sought to make sure of substantial assets in view of a possible alternative. Messrs. Rudd, James Rochfort Maguire, and Francis R. Thompson, to whom the north was well known, were advised to approach the king at Gobulawayo, and on the Unqusa river, on 30 Oct. 1888, Lobengula signed a concession, granting them mineral rights in all his territories and promising to grant no land con-