On account of these characteristics, notwithstanding all his wonderful faculties, Cecil Rhodes will never remain an historical figure like the Count of Egmont during the Revolt of the Netherlands, or Mirabeau at the time of the French Revolution.  Undoubtedly he achieved great things, but nothing truly beautiful.  I do not think that even the warmest of his admirers can ever say that the organising and amalgamation of De Beers or the conquest of Matabeleland had anything beautiful about them.  Still, they were triumphs which no one except himself could have achieved.  He undoubtedly erected an edifice the like of which had never been seen in modern times, and he opened to the ambitions and to the greed of the world new prospects, new sources of riches, which caused very many to look upon him as truly the god of material success.

Rhodes can be said to have revolutionised Society by bringing to the social horizon people who, but for the riches he placed within reach of their grasping fingers, would never have been able to emerge from their uncultured obscurity.

People have said to me, “How generous was Rhodes!” Yes, but always with a shade of disdain in the giving which hurt the recipients of his charity.  One of the legends in the Cape is that half those whom Rhodes helped had been his victims at one time or the other.

It was no wonder that Cecil Rhodes was an embittered man when one reflects how many curses must have been showered upon his head.  The conquest of Matabeleland had not gone by without evoking terrible enmities; and the amalgamation of De Beers, in consequence of which so many people who had spent thousands of pounds in acquiring plots of ground where they had hoped to find diamonds, and who had later to part from them for a mere song, were among the things never forgiven him by those whom the speculations had ruined.  Later on came the famous Bill which he caused to be adopted in both Houses of Legislature concerning the illicit buying of diamonds, the I.D.B.  Act.

The I.D.B. enactment destroyed one of the fundamental principles in British legislature which always supposes a man to be innocent until he has been proved guilty.  It practically put the whole of Cape Colony under the thumb of De Beers.  The statute was not wisely framed.  It could be invoked to remove persons whose presence in Kimberley was inconvenient.  Therefore the I.D.B.  Act drew on the head of Rhodes and of his colleagues torrents of abuse.  It is, unfortunately, certain that cases happened where diamonds were hidden surreptitiously among the effects of certain persons who had had the imprudence to say too loudly that they meant to expose the state of things existing in Kimberley; and in consequence innocent men were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.