Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/77

Rh convictions and of great wealth, which would do for the unity of the English-speaking race what the Society of Jesus did for the Catholic Church immediately after the Reformation.

The English-speaking race stood to Mr. Rhodes for all that the Catholic Church stood to Ignatius Loyola. Mr. Rhodes saw in the English-speaking race the greatest instrument yet evolved for the progress and elevation of mankind—shattered by internal dissensions and reft in twain by the declaration of American Independence, just as the unity of the Church was destroyed by the Protestant Reformation. Unlike Loyola, who saw that between Protestants and Catholics no union was possible, and who therefore devoted all his energies to enable the Catholics to extirpate their adversaries, Mr. Rhodes believed that it was possible to secure the reunion of the race. Loyola was an out-and-out Romanist. He took sides unhesitatingly with the Pope against the Reformers. The attitude of Mr. Rhodes was altogether different. He was devoted to the old flag, but in his ideas he was American, and in his later years he expressed to me his unhesitating readiness to accept the reunion of the race under the Stars and Stripes if it could not be obtained in any other way. Although he had no objection to the Monarchy, he unhesitatingly preferred the American to the British Constitution, and the text-book which he laid down for the guidance of his novitiates was a copy of the American Constitution.

Imagine the soul of an Erasmus in the skin of a Loyola ready to purchase the unity of Christendom by imposing upon the Pope the theses which Luther nailed upon the church door at Wittenberg, and you have some idea of the standpoint of Mr. Rhodes.

He was for securing union, if necessary, by means which at first sight were little calculated to promote unity. If the American Constitution was his political text-book, his one favourite expedient for inducing Americans to recognise the need for unity was the declaration of a tariff war waged by means of differential duties upon imports from those English-speaking commonwealths which clapped heavy duties on British goods.

Finding that I sympathised with his ideas about English-speaking reunion and his Society—although I did not see eye