At the same time Kruger imposed heavy taxation upon the gold industry and the people who conducted it; and out of the proceeds he was able not only to pay the expenses of government without burdening the Boer farmers, but to build up the military power by means of which he hoped ultimately to carry out his great project.  Thus the ‘Uitlanders’ found themselves treated as an inferior race in the land which their industry was enriching.  They practically paid the cost of the government, but had no share in directing it.

The policy of racial ascendancy has seldom been pursued in a more mischievous or dangerous form.  One cannot but feel a certain sympathy with the Boers’ desire to maintain Boer ascendancy in the land which they had conquered.  Yet it must be remembered that they were themselves very recent immigrants:  the whole settlement of the Transvaal had taken place in Paul Kruger’s lifetime.

The diamonds and the gold of the recent discoveries had produced in South Africa a new element of power:  the power of great wealth, wielded by a small number of men.  Some of these were, of course, mean and sordid souls, to whom wealth was an end in itself.  But among them one emerged who was more than a millionaire, who was capable of dreaming great dreams, and had acquired his wealth chiefly in order that he might have the power to realise them.  This was Cecil Rhodes, an almost unique combination of the financier and the idealist.  If he was sometimes tempted to resort to the questionable devices that high finance seems to cultivate, and if his ideals took on sometimes a rather vulgar colour, reflected from his money-bags, nevertheless ideals were the real governing factors in his life.

He dreamed of a great united state of South Africa; it was to be a British South Africa; but it was to be British, not in the sense in which Kruger wished it to be Dutch, but in the sense that equality of treatment between the white races should exist within it, as in all the British lands.  He dreamed also of a great brotherhood of British communities, or communities governed by British ideals, girdling the world, perhaps dominating it (for Rhodes was inclined to be a chauvinist), and leading it to peace and liberty.  As a lad fresh from Oxford, in long journeyings over the African veldt, he had in a curious, childlike way thought out a theology, a system of politics, and a mode of life for himself; having reached the conclusion that the British race had on the whole more capacity for leading the world successfully than any other, he had resolved that it should be his life’s business to forward and increase the influence of British ideas and of British modes of life; and he had systematically built up a colossal fortune in order that he might have the means to do this work.  At the roots of this strange medley of poetry and chauvinism which filled his mind was an unchanging and deep veneration for the outstanding memory of his youth, Oxford, which in his mind stood for all