millions, Rhodes resolved that they should be found by the British (and foreign) speculative investor. He would adapt to the Bourses of the nineteenth century the model which had served the seventeenth and eighteenth to lay British foundations in two hemispheres, from the East Indies to Hudson's Bay. The North Borneo Company, I think, was the modern instance which directly suggested the Charter plan to our young colonist. It was essential to his plan, however, that he should be in a position to underwrite his project, as it were, not only with a large fortune of his own, but by throwing into the scale at critical moments the stake of that vast funded wealth which he created in the Kimberley diamond-mining trust.
And the amazing thing is that he did not make the fortune first and then conceive the application of it, as a tired millionaire's hobby. We are familiar nowadays with such an origin for great philanthropic and patriotic schemes. A man makes his millions in exploiting the Turk to lavish them on emigrating the Jew, or emerges from a comer in steel to give off the transmuted metal in a Danaë-shower of free libraries, while philosophers like Mr. John Morley and Mr. Frederic Harrison decorate his brow with chaste wreaths. It is one of the more creditable features of the modern aggregation of wealth; but Rhodes's case was different. The historian will find the evidence ample and conclusive that the dreamy young colonist who built up the De Beers monopoly had already, as an Oxford undergraduate, projected his plan of a life-work for the British Empire; that this daydream supplied his spiritual food throughout the absorbing struggle of the ten years which patience and genius required to create De Beers; and that he emerged from the dust of that squalid arena to fling himself heart-whole into the toil of realizing the dream with the help of the financial weapon which he had framed and tempered for it Many a youth might have said: 'Go to! I will lay up great possessions, that I may then apply them to such and such an ideal.'
