road. The Dutchmen could feel the soil in his bones, see the horizon in his eyes. Silly people sometimes took his adoption of old Dutch ways, furniture and house-plenishing, for a politic affectation. No; it was as genuine as his passion for Table Mountain or the Matoppos. In the height of his Dutch popularity, there was once some great pilgrimage of colonial Boers to Groote Schuur, when all they heard and saw so captivated them that one veteran suddenly stooped in the grounds, picked up a great rough stone, and cried out that he would hand it down to his remotest descendants as a memento of that day and scene. I do not know whether, after the Raid, that stone came to be converted into a missile. But I remember among the things that pleased the old farmer that day at Groote Schuur was a discussion how best to keep together the old colonial estates, Rhodes deprecating the Dutch way of splitting them up among the cadets of their big families, and praising rather a sort of selective entail. That was derided at the time as an obvious piece of playing to Dutch sentiment. Such a bit of old Toryism could never be Rhodes's natural view! Natural or not, it appeared, as we all remember, in his own will, and is stamped on the provisions under which the Norfolk estate of Dalham Hall is devised to his heirs.
In politics, too, Rhodes's way of looking at many questions was rather like that of the best sort of progressive Cape Dutchman—the sort of Dutchman who really farms, and wants his flocks dipped, and his children schooled, and his natives kept sober, but never names 'Exeter Hall,' 'War Office,' or 'red tape,' except in senses partly interchangeable and wholly pejorative. Into that mould, indeed, Rhodes fitted far more naturally than into the mould of our commercial urban electorates in South Africa, patriotically English as they were, but ridden by newspaper formulas. He was never quite comfortable as the leader of a party with no Dutchmen in it. I remember well his first appearances in the rôle of the out-and-out Progressive party man.
