Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/119

Rh despatch of emissaries on missions of propagandism throughout the Empire, and the steps to be taken to pave the way for the foundation and the acquisition of a newspaper which was to be devoted to the service of the cause. There was at one time a discussion of a proposal to endow the Association of Helpers with the annual income of £5,000, but Mr. Rhodes postponed the execution of this scheme until he was able to make the endowment permanent. He was heavily drawn upon in the development of Rhodesia; he did not wish to realise his securities just then, but he entered with the keenest interest into all these projects.

“I tell you everything,” he said to me; “I tell you all my plans. You tell me all your schemes, and when we get the northern country settled we shall be able to carry them out. It is necessary,” he added, “that I should tell you all my ideas, in order that you may know what to do if I should go. But,” he went on, “I am still full of vigour and life, and I don’t expect that I shall require anyone but myself to administer my money for many years to come.”

It was at an interview in January, 1895, that Mr. Rhodes first announced to me his intention to found scholarships. It is interesting to compare the first draft of his intentions with the final form in which it was given in his will of 1899 and its codicil of 1900. He told me that when he was on the Red Sea in 1893 a thought suddenly struck him that it would be a good thing to create a number of scholarships tenable at a residential English University, that should be open to the various British Colonies. He proposed to found twelve scholarships every year, each tenable for three years, of the value of £250 a year, to be held at Oxford. He said he had added a codicil to his will making provision for these scholarships, which would entail an annual charge upon his estate of about £10,000 a year. He explained that there would be three for French Canadians and three for British. Each of the Australasian Colonies, including Western Australia and Tasmania, was to have three—that is to say, one each year; but the Cape, because it was his own Colony, was to have twice as many scholarships as any other Colony. This, he said, he had done in order to give us, as his executors and heirs, a friendly lead as to the kind of thing he wanted done