Page:The empire and the century.djvu/525

 keep coming off the worse politically. Rhodes accepted supersession. The 'Lost Leader' was content that

'We shall march prospering, not thro' his presence'— provided only that we marched.

Rhodes started uphill. He entered Cape politics in a day when Downing Street and South Africa were sick of each other's very names. The weary Titan who has just poured out two hundred millions was loth to spend another million then. Those were days when Froude, sent out as a missionary of Empire, could publicly advocate Great Britain's retiring from all South Africa except Simon's Bay; when the dictum that there was no more place for direct Imperialism in the country, so often quoted against Rhodes himself, could be echoed, word for word, by a Governor and High Commissioner of the Queen; when even a Wools Sampson could help in a solemn burial of the Union Jack at Pretoria. The Transvaal was gone, and no sooner gone than the Boer junta began to be provided with new sinews of war by the eager toil of British miners. Naturally, legitimately even, it became the focus of ambitions, anti-British because patriotically Republican. The push towards South African Union was as inevitable as the push of a plant towards the sun. But was union to come within or without the Empire? Wealth, power, the lure of beckoning career—these signposts now pointed all to Pretoria, and drew from Cape Colony the ablest and most ambitious of the Queen's young Dutch subjects. On every border bands of patriotic Boers were thrusting outward for expansion: south-east, towards a seaport; northward, towards the unappropriated residue of South Africa; westward, to join hands with Germany and so shut for ever the road to that residue from the British south. What was Rhodes to do?