Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/70

56 plans are but rudely sketched in outline, and much of the work which he had begun is threatened with destruction by his one fatal mistake. But he lived long enough to enable those who were nearest to him to realise his idea and to recognise the significance of his advent upon the stage in the present state of the evolution of human society.

Mr. Rhodes was more than the founder of a dynasty. He aspired to be the creator of one of those vast semi-religious, quasi-political associations which, like the Society of Jesus, have played so large a part in the history of the world. To be more strictly accurate, he wished to found an Order as the instrument of the will of the Dynasty, and while he lived he dreamed of being both its Cæsar and its Loyola. It was this far-reaching, world-wide aspiration of the man which rendered, to those who knew him, so absurdly inane the speculations of his critics as to his real motives. Their calculations as to his ultimate object are helpful only because they afford us some measure of the range of their horizon. When they told us that Mr. Rhodes was aiming at amassing a huge fortune, of becoming Prime Minister of the Cape, or even of being the President of the United States of South Africa, of obtaining a peerage and of becoming a Cabinet Minister, we could not repress a smile. They might as well have said he was coveting a new pair of pantaloons or a gilded epaulette. Mr. Rhodes was one of the rare minds whose aspirations are as wide as the world. Such aspirations are usually to be discovered among the founders of religions rather than among the founders of dynasties. It is this which constituted the unique, and to many the utterly incomprehensible, combination of almost incompatible elements in Mr. Rhodes’s character. So utterly incomprehensible was the higher mystic side of Mr. Rhodes’s character to those among whom it was his fate to live and work, that after a few vain efforts to explain his real drift he gave up the task in despair. It would have been easier to interpret colour to a man born blind, or melody to one stone-deaf from his birth, than to open the eyes of the understanding of the “bulls” and “bears” of the Stock Exchange to the far-reaching plans and lofty ambitions which lay behind the issue of Chartereds. So the real Rhodes dwelt apart in the sanctuary of his imagination, into which the profane were never admitted.