Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/112

98 do, I think it is clear that He would like me to do what He is doing Himself. And as He is manifestly fashioning the English-speaking race as the chosen instrument by which He will bring in a state of society based upon Justice, Liberty and Peace, He must obviously wish me to do what I can to give as much scope and power to that race as possible. Hence,” so he concludes this long argument, “if there be a God, I think that what He would like me to do is to paint as much of the map of Africa British red as possible, and to do what I can elsewhere to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race.”

Mr. Rhodes had found his longed-for ideal, nor has he ever since then had reason to complain that it was not sufficiently elevated or sufficiently noble to be worth the devotion of his whole life.

The passage in Aristotle which exercised so much influence upon the Oxford undergraduate was his definition of virtue, “Virtue is the highest activity of the soul living for the highest object in a perfect life.” That, he said, had always seemed to him the noblest rule to follow, and he made it his rule from the first. I kept no written notes of that memorable conversation. But the spirit and drift of our talk the following extract from a letter which I wrote to Mr. Rhodes three months later may suffice to illustrate:—

“I have been thinking a great deal since I first saw you about your great idea” (that of the Society, which he certainly did not take from the Pall Mall Gazette), “and the more I think the more it possesses me, and the more I am shut up to the conclusion that the best way in which I can help towards its realisation is, as you said in a letter to me last month, by working towards the paper. If, as it seems to me, your idea and mine is in its essence the undertaking according to our lights to rebuild the City of God and reconstitute in the nineteenth century some modern equivalent equipped with modern appliances of the Mediæval Church of the ninth century on a foundation as broad as Humanity, then some preliminary inspection of the planet would seem almost indispensable.”

Any immediate action in this direction, however, was postponed until he made a success of Mashonaland. He wrote,