With how many would the ideal have survived the acquisition?
The financial was only half Rhodes's idea; the other half, which led to his extraordinary career in Cape politics, was concerned with the men rather than the money—the men and the methods of pioneering. It was to draw in the adventurous youth of South Africa, Dutch as well as English, to his adventure under the Union Jack; it was to secure the Cape as a base for Imperial, as against Republican, expansion, by presenting Imperialism as Colonialism and working with colonists on colonial lines. To win and hold Dutch sentiment at the Cape while foiling Dutch ambition in the Republics was Rhodes's problem; and till 1895 he marvellously solved it.
He must have failed if Paul Kruger's statesmanship had looked out upon a wider horizon. There the Boer was found wanting. When the Transvaal ruling families came into their kingdom they forgot their kinsmen in the Colony. They did not remember so only to be anti-England as not to seem anti-Cape. In railways, customs, trade, State employment, they played the German game, the Hollander game, the Portuguese game—everything but the Afrikander game; while Rhodes threw the door of the north wide, and eagerly invited every young Dutchman to share in the work of development. With all his gnarled strength and subtle shrewdness, Kruger lacked Rhodes's sense of the grand scale, his zest in noble giving, his eye to the future. The patriotism of each, underneath its calculating materialism, had a deep spring of fire. In Kruger it was his sombre piety; in Rhodes, a latent poetry and romance, grandiose perhaps, but no whit less genuine. From these deep springs the conceptions of the one drew breadth; of the other, narrowness. And so during the years when the work of white expansion was being completed in South Africa, Rhodes gamed with the Cape Dutch all that Kruger lost, till the last square mile of No-Man's-Land was safe under the British flag.
