But in 1886 gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand; in 1888 Rhodes ...

But in 1886 gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand;

in 1888 Rhodes

amalgamated the Kimberley Diamond Companies, and in 1889 the South African Company was incorporated. In the person of Rhodes, all the Imperialisms of the age seem to exist in a confused, inextricable embodiment.

Of the stock and origin which has bred so many conquerors, he went out from his father's rectory in Hertfordshire to grow cotton in Natal, to hunt for diamonds and keep up his classics, and to nourish two ambitions. One was to become a graduate of the University of Oxford: the other to federate the Empire, an Empire so vastly enlarged that it could impose its Peace on all the nations of the world.

He was barely thirty-six when, thrusting past the raids and outflanking with which Germany, Portugal, and the Transvaal were seeking to enclose the Cape Colony, he had carried the frontier from the Orange River to the Zambezi. But in England, where Empire meant either the self-government of kindred communities, or the just rule of a superior caste, this new African venture had awakened many misgivings.

Names of a kind not greatly honored, Beit, Bobl, Barney Barnato, were too conspicuous on its foundation stones.

...next: >>