My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than Empires, and more slow …
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity?
'Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near' is exactly what Rhodes seemed always to be hearing. Often he would try, with sudden passionate intensity, and in words considerably less choice than Marvell's, yet poignant, too, in their way, to make that sound audible to others—persons with indolent delays, tiresome doubts, perhaps (let us confess) tiresome scruples. Only towards the end he learned at last a certain manly, if rather wistful, patience.
Part II.— MILNER.
A cool head and a fresh initiative—those were the crying needs of the High Commissionership in 1897 when Milner stepped into it out of Somerset House.
The old landmarks of Imperial policy in South Africa were no longer standing. Rhodes was down. Doornkop, as a name for false start and failure, had replaced Majuba. Lord Rosmead, lost without Rhodes, ill, aged, and broken with responsibility, had gone home to die. In the race for union the vantage of the moment was anti-Imperial. Kruger held the lead if he had known how to use it. On the map England stood well. There Rhodes's work could not be undone; and in population we were creeping up. But that was all neutralized by a singular racial disparity in political status; and here, as we have seen, the Rhodes method had broken down. On our part of the map the Dutch unit counted double: he was a citizen, even over-represented; on the Boer part of the map the Britisher was not allowed to count at all. The taxation without representation from which America revolted was a trifle beside the Outlander's. And here fleecer and fleeced
