on the part of Messrs Rudd, Maguire, and Thompson; but the task of securing its practical exploitation remained.

In a recent address to the African Society* Mr Maguire, now President of the British South Africa Company, has given an interesting account of the impression produced on his mind by LoBengula's attitude towards the problem of contact between his people and white civilisation. That attitude, Mr Maguire felt, was one of haunting fear of something which, though too strong to be ultimately resisted, should, nevertheless, be deferred so far as possible. It is not wonderful, then, that there should have been a real danger that LoBengula might repent of the grant which he had signed. Rival would-be concessionaires were at his elbow to warn him and his people that he was giving away his country, and were so far successful that LoBengula actually put to death the induna whom he held answerable for having advised him to sign the Rudd Concession, thus drastically applying to the circumstances of his own savage monarchy the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. The influence of Her Majesty's Government was required to persuade LoBengula to stick to his bond, but would not of itself have sufficed for this purpose, had not two adventurous journeys been made to the Chief's kraal by Dr Jameson as the personal Ambassador of Rhodes.

The story of Jameson's life has been told by Mr Ian Colvin in two brilliant volumes. If his work is a less closely woven historical narrative than Mr Williams' 'Life of Rhodes,' less accurately documented, and as such less valuable as a book of reference, it is that of a young man who has sat at the feet of one old enough to be his father and has loved him with a filial devotion. It is filled with the very spirit of hero-worship. It is a glorious tale of courage and daring effort, of marvellous journeys, of high achievements, of catastrophic failure, and of patient brave recovery.

Jameson indeed, the beloved 'Doctor' of Kimberley days, Rhodes' physician and life-long friend, was of all the characters in this romantic story the most wholly possessed by the Elizabethan spirit of adventure. He

* Journal of the African Society,' vol. xxii, no. lxxxvi.

was the first of the Rhodesian pioneers, explorer and administrator. He was to be the leader of the Raid, to know the inside of an English gaol, and afterwards to rise again to be Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, to be with General Botha the chief architect of the Union of South Africa, and to end his life as President of the British South Africa Company. He was gifted with an intelligence of lightning quickness, a radiant and infectious humour, personal charm amounting to witchery, and courage passing the bounds of audacity and physical endurance. LoBengula was not proof against a personality whom very few could resist. Jameson's skill relieved the pain of the gout from which the stout old Chief suffered. The Chief took Jameson into high favour, made him an 'induna' of his favourite regiment, kept his word with Jameson's principals, and at his last interview with him promised him the road'—that is to say, undertook to admit to his territory the emissaries of the Company which was to develop its wealth.

At length, in the latter part of 1890, the preparations for the Company's entry into Rhodes' 'North' were complete, and a force of pioneers and police, as daring a band of adventurers as ever Pizarro or Cortes led, started from Macloutsie, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, for the promised land. Accompanied and inspired by Jameson, guided by the famous big-game hunter Selous, they skirted the south-eastern edge of Matabeleland proper, where the young bloods of LoBengula's impis were with difficulty restrained by their Chief from falling upon and destroying them. Their difficulties were endless, their danger incessant; but they came safely through into the uplands of Mashonaland. On Sept. 12 they planted their flag at Fort Salisbury, now the capital of Southern Rhodesia, and Rhodes' race for the North

was won.

To retain what had been acquired needed as much hardihood as its acquisition; but it would be impossible here to do more than allude to Jameson's labours in establishing the nucleus of a civilised Government for his pioneers and the natives surrounding them, in encouraging their infant industries of mining and agriculture, and in finding for them a road to the sea at Beira. Mr Colvin has told the tale; and all that need

now be said is that, although the task of supplying the tiny white community and of providing for its government and protection right in the interior of Africa at a vast distance from the British colonies on the sea-coast, strained the financial resources of the British South Africa Company to the uttermost, somehow or other the work was done. The white community took root. Within three years it possessed, though in the simplest form, the apparatus of civil administration; cattle were bred, maize was grown, and, though the glittering visions of fabulous El Dorados faded as such visions are apt to fade, still gold in respectable quantities was produced. Then in 1893 came the Matabele War.

It has been shown that LoBengula, savage chief as he was, was in his fashion a king who respected his own word. But he could not for ever restrain the hot spirits of his young warriors who resented the presence of the white men in the king's country.' Still less, darkly though he might fear them, could he avert the consequences which always follow from pouring the new wine of white civilisation into the old bottles of primitive tribal savagery. To the Matabele the practice of periodically raiding, plundering, and slaughtering their defenceless Mashona 'subjects' was part of the settled order of existence. To the white men, who were establishing an orderly Government of Mashonaland, it was an intolerable outrage. Frontier incidents at Fort Victoria precipitated a conflict which the historian writing long after the event can recognise as having been inevitable from the first. Jameson, hastily equipping a handful of Rhodesian volunteers and hurling them with reckless daring against the hitherto invincible impis of LoBengula, defeated and dispersed the Matabele, took the Chief's kraal at Bulawayo, where now stands the largest town of Rhodesia, and drove out LoBengula himself to die a fugitive in the veld.

The occupation of what is to-day Southern Rhodesia, including Matabeleland as well as Mashonaland, was now complete. By agreement with the Imperial Government the administration of the British South Africa Company was extended over the whole territory. A vast new province had been added to the British Empire without the loss of the life of a single soldier of the

British regular army, or the expenditure of a shilling of the British taxpayer's money. The whole heavy cost of occupation and conquest, and of defraying the expenses of administration of a territory just redeemed from barbarism, which as yet yielded little revenue, had been paid by the Company's shareholders, backing with their capital and enterprise the Imperial schemes of Rhodes. The foundations of the Company's Government were securely laid: the structure stood and survived a series of shocks which assailed it in its early years. It survived the Raid into the Transvaal in the last days of 1895, that blunder which had seemed to lay in the dust the colossal figure of Rhodes, and for which the remainder of Jameson's career was one noble and complete atonement: it survived the rinderpest, the disease that destroyed the cattle in which most of the wealth of the white men and all the wealth of the natives consisted: it survived the Matabele Rebellion of 1896, a far sterner struggle than had been the war of 1893 in which military victory had come so swiftly and easily that the Matabele had not fully realised that the white men were their masters; it survived the strain of the Boer War.

And not only in Southern Rhodesia was the Company's Government securely established. In Northern Rhodesia also, that still vaster area stretching from the Zambesi to Lakes Tanganyika and Nyasa, the Company, having obtained a series of land and mineral concessions from Lewanika and other native chiefs, has established, peacefully and bloodlessly, an administration which makes those who are privileged to see its officers carrying on their work among the natives in their remote and lonely posts prouder of their countrymen than before. So it came about that in the Great War of 1914-18, Rhodesia, of all the dependencies of the British Empire, was able to send the largest proportion of its white population to the battlefield, to send tens of thousands of Northern Rhodesia natives to act as carriers for the supply of the troops in German East Africa, and even to recruit from the Matabele themselves regiments to fight against the German-led 'askari.' Where, it might be asked, would these askari' have been standing in the Great War if the Germans and not Rhodes had won the race for the North, if the native tribes of

6

the whole of Rhodesia, including the Matabele, had been available to furnish recruits to be drilled, trained, and led by Prussian officers, and the German, not the British power had been paramount in South Central Africa? To what perils might not the South African harbours, and with them the deep sea route to the East, have been exposed, indispensable as that route was to the Allies while submarines in the Mediterranean threatened the passage of the Suez Canal?

It is worth while to pause at this point, to look back and to consider what, from the public point of view, has been the fulfilment of the expectations held out when the petition for the Charter was submitted to the Crown.

In one of the letters written to the Colonial Office by the petitioners before the grant of the Charter, mention was made of their intention to extend the Cape railway system northwards in the direction of the Zambesi; and it has been through a vigorous policy of railway development that the effective occupation of the British South Africa Company's great territory, its mineral development, its colonisation and the extension throughout it of an orderly civil administration has been rendered possible.

In 1888, when Messrs Rudd, Maguire, and Thompson set out from Kimberley to Bulawayo, more than 600 miles away, their journey, by mule transport, took them thirtyfive days; and they travelled hard. The first settlement of the pioneers at Salisbury in 1890 left them, for the time being, almost wholly cut off from the civilised world, with which precarious communication could only be maintained in the face of the greatest difficulty and delay, and at a crushing cost. But the work of making the country accessible has been done. Bulawayo was reached by the railway from Kimberley in 1897; and the journey of thirty-five days is now reduced to one of thirty-five hours. Salisbury was reached by the railway from Beira on the coast of Portuguese East Africa in 1899. In 1902, the line connected the two towns with one another. In 1904, it crossed the Zambesi by the bridge at the Victoria Falls. In 1909 it reached the border of the Congo Free State.

* Parliamentary Paper C. 5918, No. 82.