Accordingly Rhodes had set out to become rich; he plotted the supremacy of England in South Africa.  And now there is war on President Kruger of the Transvaal, who was at the head of its affairs in the years when Douglas was settling Oregon and California and talking of popular sovereignty.  Gold was discovered there, as it was in California; and there was a great exodus of English; and now the question is whether the Ruskin idea will triumph or Kruger’s idea, which is derived from the Bible, shall triumph.  The Bible is used in many ways and on all sides of everything.  Kruger is an abolitionist concerned with abolishing Great Britain.  But I think Great Britain will abolish him, and find plenty of Biblical authority for it.  Many sacred hymns will be sung, and God will be loudly praised when the end comes.

Rhodes is using his great wealth to assist England in her war against the Boer Republic.  He has advocated from a youth up the formation of a secret society with the following objects, as expressed by himself:  “The extension of British rule throughout the world....  The colonization by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor, and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cypress and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire.”

A large lust for land, dwarfing to Douglas’ call to American supremacy on the North American continent, the expulsion of Great Britain therefrom, and from all dominance in the Western Hemisphere.  It was rather costly to Douglas to take over Texas; and the retention of the old land of the Southern States was the nation’s crisis which killed him.  For any land-lust that Douglas had, he has paid.  Will Rhodes pay for his lust?  No, I think he will be paid for it.  For he has been a success.  He has seen his hopes for England all but realized.  So far as the United States is concerned England has recovered it.  She rules us in trade, literature, in thought.  We elect our own rulers, to be sure; but England controls them, though we pay their salaries.

However, I shall not go to South Africa.  I know that I may die in an instant; and though, if dying at sea, I might sink to the depth, where something of Dorothy remains, I would as soon be reduced to ashes and scattered on the shores of this lake that I have known so long.  That would be symbolical of my purposeless and wasted life.

The day being fine, this being Douglas’ birthday, I have come from my boarding house to the little park which bears his name, and where stands the column to his memory, crowned with a bronze counterfeit of him, standing forthright and intrepid, as I have often seen him in life.  It is a clear sky with racing clouds that the statue stands against, and I almost imagine it swaying and moving, such is the illusory effect of the clouds.  I enter the park and rest on a settee looking toward the lake.