Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/159

Rh generations ago, are much better capable of dealing with the various matters that arise than people who have to dictate some thousands of miles away. Now that is the people of the Afrikander Bond. I look upon that party as representing the people of that country.” He declared that “the future rested with the Afrikander Bond. Your ideas are the same as mine.”

While always professing his full loyalty and devotion to the mother country, he asserted that self-government would give them everything they wanted.

“Let us accept jointly the idea that the most complete internal self-government is what we are both aiming at. That self-government means that every question in connection with this country we shall decide, and we alone. The we are the white men in South Africa—Dutch and English.”

Between the two Mr. Rhodes kept the balance even. Speaking at the Paarl about the same time, he declared that he hardly knew which to choose between, the Dutch and the English, as the dominant race in the world.

“You have only got to read history to know that if ever there was a proud, rude man, it was an Englishman—the only man to cope with him was a Dutchman.”

The impression left upon the mind by the reading of these earlier speeches of Mr. Rhodes is that, while devoted to the British Empire and true to the principle of the Empire, he was nevertheless primarily a Cape Colonist. We have here nothing concerning the paramountcy of Downing Street, or even of the supremacy of the Empire. What he struggled for was the paramountcy of Cape Colony. The Cape was to be the dominant power in South Africa. The Northern extension of Bechuanaland was to be made for the Cape, and the Cape was then, as