asked, Has he the right, and is he right, to wage such wars?” [57]
What is the mode of equating the two groups of results? how much Christianity and civilisation balance how much industry and trade? are curious questions which seem to need an answer. Is not the ultimate unit in his capacity of taxpayer liable to lay more stress upon the asset which admits of momentary measurement and to undervalue the one that evades arithmetic?
“To combine the commercial with the imaginative” was the aim which Mr. Rhodes ascribed to himself as the key of his policy. The conjunction is commonly described by the word “speculation,” a word whose meaning becomes more sinister when politics and private business are so inextricably interwoven as they were in the career of Mr. Rhodes, who used the legislature of Cape Colony to support and strengthen the diamond monopoly of De Beers, while from De Beers he financed the Raid, debauched the constituencies of Cape Colony, and bought the public press, in order to engineer the war, which was to win him full possession of his great “thought” the North. [58]