exercised over General Gordon. Everyone knows that Gordon wished Mr. Rhodes to go with him to Khartoum on the famous mission which had so tragic a termination, but I was not aware until I found it in this book how insistent Gordon had been to secure Mr. Rhodes’s assistance in the pacification of Basutoland.
It was in the year 1882 that Gordon and Rhodes met. “Vindex” says that they were both deeply interested in the Basuto question. They used to take long walks together and discuss Imperial and other questions, with the result of vigorous argument between them. They became such close friends that when Rhodes was starting for Kimberley, Gordon pressed him hard to stay and work with him in Basutoland. Rhodes refused on the ground that he had already mapped out his life’s work, which lay elsewhere. Gordon would take no denial for a long time, and when forced to give in at last, said, ‘‘There are very few men in the world to whom I would make such an offer, but of course you will have your own way.” “You always contradict me,” Gordon said to Rhodes, “you always think you are right and every one else wrong,” a formula which Rhodes, no doubt, would have applied with equal justice to Gordon himself. The closeness of the tie which bound together the two men was natural enough. Both were idealists whose thoughts ran on the same lines in many things, the chief difference being not as to aims but as to the practical methods for realising them. This is well illustrated by Rhodes’s well-known observation when Gordon told him that he had refused a roomful of gold offered him by the Chinese Government as a reward for suppressing the Taeping rebellion. “I would have taken it,” said Rhodes, “and as many roomfuls as they would have given me. It is of no use to have big ideas if you have not the cash to carry them out.”
That Rhodes had big ideas no person who reads this collection of speeches will doubt. One of the earliest speeches in “Vindex’s” collection was that which he delivered in July, 1883, on the Basutoland Annexation Bill. It was a veritable Confession of Faith, the declaration of political convictions from which Mr. Rhodes never varied.
