So for all was success. Not till the struggle over the map gave place to the struggle over civic status did the Rhodes method break down. But the success had a price. The price was a policy within Cape Colony so tender to Dutch prejudices as to gall many English ones. That bring up one of our touchstone aspects. What part was fuse in the fabric of Dutch conciliation which Rhodes built up with the best years of his manhood, and shattered in an hour? It is forgotten now, or, perhaps, by many it was never understood, how much of the sympathy between Rhodes and the colonial Boer was genuine. That long political union was not all a mariage de conveyance. Rhodes was of an ancestry of East Anglian graziers, and the landward strain was strong and native in him. By taste and temperament he was a country squire. From financial and industrial board-rooms; from the close air of Parliaments, where he never seemed at home; from the great mobs of city men or Cape Town electors, which, in late years, he learned to sway, he loved to betake himself to roadmaking among the hanging woods of Groote Schuur, or experimental farming in Rhodesia. Escaped from town to Rondebosch, with the air of a released schoolboy he threw on the old flannels and the shocking bad hat, jumped on the favourite hack, and was off along the flanks of the mountain, riding with a loose Boer seat and daydreaming in the saddle.
In England, if he had never seen a Colony, he would have been in his element as a lord of broad acres, improving the estate, founding industries on it, creating model villages, living on terms half feudal, half democratic, and entailing the estate at the end under strenuous conditions of public duty. He loved landscape, forestry, the farm stud, irrigation, wide views, large maps, an added acre, a new country, the clean, keen air of the veld. And therefore, when Rhodes and an old Dutch farmer came to talk, out on the stoep, they knew each other for kindred spirits. No need for pretence, so long as the talk was left, like a familiar horse, to take its own
