When he realized that I wanted the truth and was prepared to accept it, he let himself go freely. He spoke of Hofmeyr with affection and of Rhodes with pity. I soon found him one of the wisest and best informed of counselors. I asked him about Governor General Sir Hercules Robinson, whom I knew and liked. "Alas!" said Sivewright. "He's too wedded to Rhodes; but he's honest and capable."
At length we came to the Jameson Raid and the famous telegram from the women in Johannesburg, asking for Jameson's help. "That telegram," said Sivewright, "was written in Rhodes's office in Cape Town and sent from there to The Times." I was horrified, but he gave me the proofs of what he alleged.
My first day in Cape Town had been astonishingly fruitful. At once I wrote an article and some notes for the Saturday Review and then, out of my affection for Arthur Walter, I wrote to him, giving chapter and verse for my belief, and begging him to modify the attitude of The Times. A little later Cecil Rhodes told me he knew I was working against him through Walter, and after that I let The Times take care of itself.
After the raid, Rhodes went up to Kimberley and the British element made his railway journey a sort of triumphal progress, but the more thoughtful spirits all condemned him. On his return to Cape Town he prepared to go back to England at once.
I had several interesting talks with him, and because he had been jolted, so to speak, out of his ordinary self-centered optimistic attitude, I came to know him better than ever before. I found he had gone entirely astray.
"What on earth could you hope to win by the raid?" I asked at length.
"I don't admit I had anything to do with it," Rhodes replied.
"Let us leave that," I answered, "but what could Dr. Jim hope to win by it?
Suppose he had got into Johannesburg; next day it would have been surrounded by five thousand Boers and in a week would have had to surrender."
"In a week a great deal might happen," said Rhodes sententiously.
"I understand," I replied. "Hercules Robinson would probably have gone north and consulted Krueger to play fair, but neither in war nor peace could your raiders have gained anything. It was an idiotic move."
"And suppose Chamberlain had taken a hand in the game?" Rhodes went on.
"You mean to say?" I cried; he nodded- "Worse and worse," I countered; "that would have meant war, a race war in South Africa with fifty thousand Boer settlers and eighty thousand English loafers; you would have needed one hundred thousand British soldiers.
Rhodes, you could not want that!"
"Krueger would have given in," he said.
"You know better," I cried, "you know Krueger would never give in and his Boers would back him to the last."
"Evidently you know South Africa better than I do," was his final fling.
"I am appealing," I said, "to Rhodes sober, the Rhodes I knew years ago, who taught me a good deal about South Africa and the Boer stubbornness."
"Well," he said smiling, "the end is not yet; don't condemn me before the end."
To that I nodded my head.
This talk was only preliminary; I wanted to know Rhodes better: his real view of life and what he wanted to do in it. At length, one evening, I came to an understanding of his peculiar view of the world.
He had already spoken to me of Ruskin, who had influenced him profoundly through a lecture at Oxford; and he had come to believe that the Darwinian theory of evolution was the most probable explanation of the world, that it is the law of some supreme being, rather than the result of blind forces. God, he thought, was obviously trying to produce a type of humanity the best fitted to bring peace, liberty, and justice into the world, and thus make, as Heine said, "A Kingdom of God on this earth." One race to him seemed to approach God's ideal type-his own, the Anglo-Saxon. He knew no language but English, and that only imperfectly, and so was easily convinced of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon character. God's purpose, to him, was to make the Anglo-Saxon race predominant.
As an ideal, it seemed to me grotesque. The races of the world to me were like flowers in a garden, and I would cherish every variety for its own especial excellence; far from being too numerous, they were not numerous enough, and there was not enough variety. The French seemed to be dropping into the second class, according to the judgment of force and numbers, but how could humanity afford to lose the French ideal of life? The French had done more for abstract justice in their social relations and more, too, for the ideal in art than any other race; we couldn't afford to lose the French. Yet, there are only forty millions of French people, whereas there are already nearly two hundred millions of Anglo-Saxons, and soon there will be a thousand millions, and yet what mistakes they make! Would not the consciousness of power make them increasingly intolerant?
I couldn't influence Rhodes; he talked to me repeatedly of Bartle Frere's idea: the English should possess Africa from the Cape to Cairo. "They already own more than one-half of the Temperate Zone," I said; "isn't that enough for them? And they don't know how to use it."
Still, I had already come to see that the vast central plateau of Africa from the Cape to Cairo was the most magnificent possession in the world, finer far than even the North American colonies that England had thrown away. Was it the chance of insular position, or really some superiority in the race, that had given one empire after the other into their possession? On the surface, it was merely the greed of the aristocratic English class to get ever more land into their power. But their continual extraordinary growth perhaps shows some spiritual ascendency. I should like to believe it, though I later found certain special virtues in the attempts at German colonization.
One day at dinner I ventured on a jest which distressed Rhodes dreadfully. I said I could understand God, in His youth, falling in love with the Jews, an extremely attractive race, but in His old age to fall in love with the Anglo- Saxon was a proof of senility that I could hardly forgive Him. Rhodes cried out at once: "You say things, Harris, that hurt."
"I would like to shock your idolatry of the English," I cried; "fancy the race that loves commerce and wealth more than any other and yet refuses for a century to adopt the metric system in weights and measures and coinage!
Harold Frederic used always to talk of the stupid Britons.
"The masters of the world," Rhodes retorted.
"Nonsense," I replied. "The Americans are already far stronger and more reasonable."
We parted friends but disagreed profoundly.
Rhodes was completely uneducated, ignorant, indeed, to a degree that was painful; an almost blind force from which as much might be feared as hoped.
Yet perhaps of his want of education, he was in most intimate sympathy with the intense patriotism and imperial ideas of the English governing class, and he was rich enough to advance his views in a hundred ways; money, to him, was chiefly a means to an end.
After much talk with Sivewright, I called on Jan Hofmeyr, who greeted me with the old kindness. "Very glad you've come out," he said; "now there's some chance of making title truth known." He did not conceal his profound disappointment with Rhodes. "Another Briton," he said, "whom we had taken for a great Afrikander," and he added, with rare prescience, "he may do worse for us yet! He's really madder than Oom Paul." We talked for hours day after day and at length, when I had to say "Goodbye," he gave me a letter to Chief Justice Kotze at Pretoria, whom he praised cordially: "He will give you pure wine to drink on almost every South African subject."
From Sivewright and Jan Hofmeyr I got the truth about the raid and then called on Sir Hercules Robinson, the Governor General. He was before all an official, and an English official at that, but he had a certain understanding of South Africa and the best South African opinion; and though he sympathized with Rhodes's imperial ambitions, he would never defend such an outrage as the raid.