MR. CECIL RHODES ON MASHONALAND.
WE are not specially fond of Mr. Cecil Rhodes. He always seems to us to approximate too closely to the type of the Elizabethan buccaneer ; he mixes up the advancement of the Empire too closely with big dividends ; and he condones slavery—or is it serfdom ?—in a way which suggests that he thinks that evil system not a bad nexus between the white and the black populations. It is impossible to deny, however, that he is a considerable personage in the Empire, the ruling spirit in South Africa, and destined, perhaps, if he can but keep his health, to mount to yet loftier destinies. Essentially a man of action, born to give the decisions through which great enterprises succeed, he possesses what few such men have ever possessed, the gift of persuasive utterance. He speaks as well as Prince Bismarck, and in much the same style, especially as regards that air of frankness which is sometimes genuine, and sometimes, one fancies, is adopted to conceal a thought it is not yet safe to avow. His ideas are as large as those of the maker of Germany, and if we were Portuguese, we should probably say that there was not much more scruple about him. It is impossible, nevertheless, for an Englishman to read his speech of Tuesday to the shareholders in the British South Africa Company, the " Chartered Company " of popular parlance, without a sense of exhilaration, a feeling that the breed of Clive is not yet extinct, and that here among Englishmen of to-day is a man of the type which makes history and founds Empires. While we are disputing in England about the best way of governing Irishmen by " love," and of feeding the unemployed with- out raising rates, and of " registering " voters so as to establish manhood suffrage without voting it, Mr. Rhodes is calmly annexing territories "larger," says the Duke of Abercorn, who is Chairman of the Company, " than Central Europe," all Mashonaland, Bechuanaland, Manicaland, and North Zambesia, which includes " the reversion of Nya,ssa- land," and God knows how much more of South Africa,—a region in which white men can work, and which not only can hold millions of Englishmen, but will hold them. He has not merely annexed these lands on paper—every part being held by treaty or written concession ; even the part out of which he, not to put too fine a point on it, kicked the Portuguese— but he is bringing them all closer to England, making rail. ways, one to the coast, and one to join the Cape Colony system, and running everywhere telegraph lines. In Bechuanaland Mr. Rhodes reigns as Protector, giving orders to native chiefs ; in North Mashonaland he reigns as friend and counsellor of the native warrior, Lobengula, for whose friendship he pays £1,200 a year, remitted monthly, in a " globular " packet of sovereigns ; in North Zambesia he reigns through Mr. Johnston, who is at once agent of the Company and Imperial Commissioner ; and in Mashonaland he reigns through a person as remarkable as himself—Dr. Jameson—who, by the evidence of facts, as well as of Mr. Rhodes, and all directors of the Company, possesses a gift for ad- ministering affairs and conciliating men, such as we often seek in vain among our statesmen. The pressing question of organising a military force to protect settlers, and make settlements with Portugal, which at first threatened to swamp the Company—the armed police costing no less than £250,000 a year—was settled, Dr. Jameson inducing the white settlers to enlist as volunteers, so that the force now costs only £4 a man, or £30,000 a year for men, horses, • munitions, and supplies. The still more pressing ques- tion of immigration will be settled shortly, for there will be a railway to the Eastern coast, and a railway to the South, both already advancing ; and once they are completed, the supply of immigrants will not be the trouble, but the settlement of them as miners, farmers, and workers of every description, the land being per- fectly healthy and practically limitless in extent. And the most pressing question of all, the revenue needed to keep up these works, and sometimes feed those immigrants, is also settled for the moment by a system of heavy, in- deed unconscionable, royalties. The Chartered Company, as State, is in the precise position which Communists desire : it is sole landlord of all mines. Mr. Rhodes made a most clever defence for the weight of these royalties, and though it will not hold water as against the miners, it is not in itself quite so unreasonable as it was at first con- sidered. The miner has to pay half of all he gets ; but then, it is argued, he gets twice or five times as much as usual. That is to say, instead of giving each miner one " claim " of so many square feet, as they do in Australia and the Trans- vaal, Mr. Rhodes gives him many " claims," which, he says, makes the tax up to him. That is clever as a business offer, and we quite admit that Mr. Rhodes is within his legal right ; but we should like to know whether his argu- ment is true or only impudent. It is quite true, if the miner can sublet " claims " too big for his own working, because then the rent will pay all or part of the 50 per cent. rental exacted on the claim he is working for himself. But if nobody is willing to rent a claim, pre- ferring to get one from the Company, then, as human powers of labour are limited, the extra claims bring nothing, and the royalty is a very heavy one indeed,—so heavy, that Mr. Fenwick and his followers would, we fancy, class Mr. Rhodes among the enemies of the human race. His taxation is, then, an income-tax of 10s. in the pound. How- ever that may be, the miners can be quite trusted to take care of themselves ; somebody must pay, in meal or malt, for order in a wild region ; and the Company, which is Mr. Cecil Rhodes, will actually get a regular and increasing revenue for their own and the public's benefit. A Govern- ment, in fact, is founded in the wildest of all fertile regions, and so founded, that Englishmen may dig, and farm, and trade without danger of losing either their earnings or their lives from any form of human violence. The Boers. abstain from threatening the Company, under fear of English South Africa, and of the British Army behind it;. the Portuguese are content with their gains from the railway, and aware that, if they fight, they will only be beaten again ; and Lobengula, the savage King to the North-West, who could, we fancy, during a year or two more, make the whole business miscarry, having no witch like Gagool to advise him that a white flood never recedes, is happy in his "globular " monthly dole, and dreams not of the day when the White men will be as numerous as the stars, and able to ray out that spray of lead through which all black Africa cannot pierce. It is a wonderful story, and if it continues true for five years, Britain will have gained something like a new Australia without sending a ship, or expending one taxpayer's hoard. Verily, we do not wonder when foreign nations remark that the moderation of Englishmen reflects in itself every- thing but their acquisitions, and that England can easily be disinterested, for she has already taken more than she can consume.
It is natural that a man so successful as Mr. Rhodes, and accustomed to think of such large bits of the world as estates, should entertain some plans which look to other men just a trifle dreamy. Ii'or the moment he wants swift communication northward with Europe. He is going, he says, to construct a telegraph to Uganda, and he is quite assured that it will pay, as the one to Zambesia already does. Uganda once reached—say, in 1894—he will push his line up the Nile, we presume ; but he only says "through the Mandi's territory" to Egypt and the junction-point with the European systems. He will conquer the Mandi ? Oh dear no ! Mr. Rhodes belongs to his century, and never dreams of violence ; he will only " square " the Mandi, who will like " globular " remittances of sovereigns as well as Lobengula does, and will let the lines through his dominion for a moderate bribe. They will be finished in about ten years, and then, remarks Mr. Rhodes, we shall not scuttle out of Uganda, and probably not out of Egypt either. Very likely not if the work is done, but it is not done yet. We have no objection to raise to the project, for the telegraph oppresses no one, and, if completed, will facilitate that steady govern- ment of the Nile Valley, from Alexandria to the Lakes, which should be the English payment for what would else be a grand dacoity ; but it is all a little dreamy as yet, and some of it is dreamed, we fancy, as much to elicit British sympathy and wake the British territorial imagination, as to push any actual project on. Still, the thought is big, and Mr. Rhodes, though he probably understands savages better than Mahommedan fanatics, is just the man, if his theory of the Mandi's character is sound, to bribe him into tolerance of the instruments of civilisation. It is only, be it remarked, for the moment that there is any uncertainty as to Mr. Rhodes's success. Time is working altogether in his favour, and his risks—terrible risks some of them, if Lobengula, for instance, gets blood in his eyes—are all of to-morrow or the day after. If he can hold on undisturbed for ten years, or even six, and replace his insurrection-breeding royalties by drawing taxes on gold, alcohol, tobacco, salt, and fertile land, he and his Company, or the Royal authority, whichever may survive, will have nothing to fear from opposition in Africa itself. The English tide is submerging Boerland. The moment there is access to the sea, and the reefs of Mashonaland begin to pay like the reefs of Witwatersrand, the rush of Englishmen, Irishmen, Germans, and probably Swedes—for American immigration will have stopped— will begin to fill up the plateaus and the valleys, and supply forces which, as against the Portuguese or any Native black force whatever, will be invincible. English opinion allows any action in self-defence, and black persons, like Lobengula and Gungunhama, who are now " potentates," will then be the contemned or hated chiefs of bloodthirsty barbaric tribes. The English population will out-number the Native, and as for leaders, they will drop from the sky or rise up out of the ground. " England," said Lord Derby once, "is a reservoir of capacities," and so is every English Colony. Nothing in Mr. Rhodes's eloquent narrative strikes us more strongly than his silence upon the question of finding agents. He mentions Dr. Jameson, indeed, as born governors of men are important and scarce ; but as to all other varieties of capacity he asks only that wages be not uncertain. Of any difficulty in finding engineers to lay his railways through wild lands tenanted on the Portuguese side by fierce tribes of black enemies, or in collecting agents to lay wires through the Mandi's country, a desert tenanted by savage foes, or in hiring telegraph- clerks to live the life of hermits among fanatical Arabs, he never speaks, and probably never dreams. They will come, as the iron will come, on demand, and will do their work quite as well, and probably, if wages are regular and food sufficient, with just as little complaint. Offer a career and fair wages, and half England is at Mr. Rhodes' disposal ; and of those who go only the regular one-third will fail, the rest beating the climate, and the natives, and the fevers, and their own temptation to drink, just as they beat equal, though widely different, obstacles at home. There is no end to the supply, or, as far as we can see, to its capacity for doing anything whatsoever, from digging deep holes in blue clay to setting up an observatory on any hill which may happen to tower above its fellows, and of danger the men who make up the supplying crowd take practically no heed. That fact may reassure us somewhat as to the future, even here in London, where, instead of Mr. Rhodes, we have Mr. Tom Mann, and instead of settlers paying 50 per cent. of their earnings to the State, we have some thousands of unemployed " de- monstrating" every day on Tower Hill and in Trafalgar Square.
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