Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/134

tion is tyranny,” undertook to accept a Home Rule Bill based upon the opposite principle of the retention of Irish members. Mr. Rhodes wished the numbers of the Irish to be reduced from their present figure of 103 to 34, at any rate unless he was guaranteed the full control of the Irish police and judiciary. At that time he was willing that the question of the reduction of the Irish representation at Westminster to the figure corresponding to the extent of their contribution to Imperial taxation should be debated as an open question. He also agreed that he would not make any opposition to a clause permitting any self-governing colony to send representatives to the House of Commons on the basis of the amount of their annual contribution to the Imperial exchequer.

Mr. Parnell himself said he was prepared to accept this cheerfully, but when pressed by Mr. Rhodes to move an amendment he demurred on the ground that some of his party might object. The deal having thus been arranged in personal interview, from which both parties emerged with a profound respect for each other, Mr. Rhodes proceeded to embody the substance of their bargain in the following letter^[1] to Mr. Parnell:—

Westminster Palace Hotel,
London, S.W.
June 19th, 1888.

Dear Sir,—On my way to the Cape last autumn I had the opportunity of frequent conversations with Mr. Swift MacNeill upon the subject of Home Rule for Ireland. I then told

1. The date of this letter is sufficient to prove the absurdity of the popular superstition that Mr. Rhodes bought the support of the Irish Party for the Charter by a gift of £10,000. At that time there had been no application for the Charter, and Mr. Rhodes had not then obtained the mineral concession from Lobengula upon which the application for the Charter was based. Neither Mr. Rhodes nor Mr. Parnell alluded to the subject, either in conversation or in writing. The contract between the African and the Irishman was strictly limited to the conversion of Home Rule from a disruptive to a federative measure. It had no relation directly or indirectly to any of Mr. Rhodes’s Irish-African schemes. The whole story is told at length by “Vindex” in an appendix to “The Political Life and Speeches of Mr. Cecil Rhodes,” from which I quote these letters.