Rhodes had always been a great reader; books, indeed, had a great influence over his mind, his actions and opinions.  He used to read slowly, and what he had once assimilated he never forgot.  Years after he would remember a passage treating of some historical fact, or of some social interest, and apply it to his own work.  For instance, the idea of the Glen Grey Act was suggested to him by the famous book of Mackenzie Wallace dealing with Russia,[B] in which he described the conditions under which Russian peasants then held their land.  When Rhodes met the author of the aforementioned volume at Sandringham, where both were staying with the then Prince and Princess of Wales, he told him at once, with evident pleasure at being able to do so, that it was his book which had suggested that particular bit of legislation.

    [B] “Russia” (Cassell).

Another occasion I remember when Rhodes spoke of the great impression produced upon his opinions by a book called “The Martyrdom of Man,"[C] the work of Winwood Reade, an author not very well known to the general public.  The essay was an unusually powerful negation of the Divinity.  Rhodes had, unfortunately for him, chanced across it just after he had left the University, and during the first months following upon his arrival in South Africa he read it in his moments of leisure between looking for diamonds in the sandy plains of Kimberley.  It completely upset all the traditions in which he had been nurtured—­it must be remembered that he was the son of a clergyman—­and caused a revolt against the teachings of his former masters.

    [C] Published in the U.S.A., 1875.

The adventurous young man who had left his native country well stocked with principles which he was already beginning to find embarrassing, found in this volume an excuse for becoming the personage with whom the world was to become familiar later on, when he appeared on the horizon as an Empire Maker.  He always kept this momentous book beside him, and used to read it when he wanted to strengthen himself in some hard resolution or when he was expected to steel his mind to the performance of some task against which his finest instincts revolted even whilst his sense of necessity urged him onward.

Talking with me on the occasion I have referred to above, in respect to this volume which had left such weeds in his mind, he expressed to me his great enthusiasm about the ideas it contained, and spoke with unmeasured approval of its strong and powerful arguments against the existence of a Deity, and then exclaimed, “You can imagine the impression which it produced on me when I read it amid all the excitement of life at Kimberley not long after leaving Oxford University.”  And he added in a solemn tone, “That book has made me what I am.”