Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/123

Rh women. He was for some time in difficulty as to how to provide for the selection of his scholarships, for he rejected absolutely all suggestions which pointed to competitive examination pure and simple. A suggestion made by Professor Lindsay, of Glasgow, that the vote of the boys in the school should be decisive as to the physical and moral qualities of the competitors which Mr. Rhodes desiderated was submitted by me to Mr. Rhodes, and incorporated by him in the body of the will. The precise proportion of the marks to be allowed under each head was not finally fixed until the following year. So far as I was concerned, although still intensely interested in Mr. Rhodes’s conceptions, the change that was then made immensely reduced my responsibility. To be merely one of half a dozen executors and trustees was a very different rnatter from being charged with the chief responsibility of using the whole of Mr. Rhodes’s wealth for the purposes of political propaganda, which, if Mr. Rhodes had been killed by the Matabele or had died any time between 1891 and 1899, it would have been my duty to undertake.

When, after the raising of the siege of Kimberley, Mr. Rhodes returned to London, I had a long talk with him at the Burlington Hotel in April, 1900. Mr. Rhodes, although more affectionate than he had ever been before in manner, did not in the least disguise his disappointment that I should have thrown myself so vehemently into the agitation against the war. It seemed to him extraordinary; but he charitably concluded it was due to my absorption in the Peace Conference at the Hague. His chief objection, which obviously was present to his mind when, nearly twelve months later, he removed me from being executor, was not so much the fact that I differed from him in judgment about the war, as that I was not willing to subordinate my judgment to that of the majority of our associates who were on the spot. He said:—

“That is the curse which will be fatal to our ideas—insubordination. Do not you think it is very disobedient of you? How can our Society be worked if each one sets himself up as the sole judge of what ought to be done? Just look at the position here. We three are in South Africa, all of us your boys”—(for that was the familiar way in which he always spoke)—“I myself, Milner and Garrett, all of whom learned