he wanted to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm, if storm there was to be. So the politician turned raider. It is often argued that common standards of right and wrong cannot apply to such Uebermenschen as a Cavour, a Bismarck, or a Rhodes. It may well be so; but it does seem as if the one or two things in Rhodes's character and career which mere burgess rectitude, whether called unctuous or not, would deem to be against the rules were those for which the bills came in most punctually, and had to be most dearly paid. The things that only success could have justified were precisely those that failed and upset all the rest The parts of his work which then held firm, the traits in his character that stood out calm above the wreck, were those which show the man in as fine a light as the statesman, and need no apology for either. I present the copybook moralist with the hint.
Rhodes was given scant time to retrieve, but it was crowded with matter. The 'facing the music' at Westminster, the forlorn hope in Cape politics which his close friend was to take over and carry to success after his death, the peacemaking indaba in the Matoppos, the strangely appealing last scenes and legacy to Oxford and Empire—these are material for the biographer, to make his plot in sober truth more romantic than a novel, but must not tempt us away from the main thread of our story. We have traced the long career of patient reticence; we have tried to account for the one blunder of haste. We must now follow the torch as it passed to other hands; but in leaving Rhodes, 'let me,' in a phrase of his own, 'give you a thought,' which those who seek a clue to his character may find suggestive. Raid or no Raid, there was a sense, a somewhat tragic sense, in which Rhodes was always a man in a hurry. To the consciousness that life was not long enough for the chosen life-work there was added the knowledge that his own life was almost certain to be cut short. Not in the East only is man liable to receive in mid-career the sudden arbitrary-seeming message to bid
