his way, and a king he unquestionably was for a time at least, until his
own hand shattered his throne.

His first tenure of the Cape Premiership was most successful, and even
during the second term his popularity went on growing until the fatal
Jameson Raid--an act of folly which nothing can explain, nothing can
excuse. Until it broke his political career, transforming him from the
respected statesman whom every party in South Africa looked up to into a
kind of broken idol never more to be trusted, Rhodes had enjoyed the
complete confidence of the Dutch party. They fully believed he was the
only man capable of effecting the Union which at that time was already
considered to be indispensable to the prosperity of South Africa. Often he
had stood up for their rights as the oldest settlers and inhabitants of
the country. Even in the Transvaal, notwithstanding the authority wielded
then by President Kruger, the populace would gladly have taken advantage
of his services and of his experience to help them settle favourably their
everlasting quarrels with the Uitlanders, as the English colonists were
called.

Had Cecil Rhodes but had the patience to wait, and had he cared to enter
into the details of a situation, the intricacies of which none knew better
than he, it is probable that the annexation of the Transvaal to the
British Empire would have taken place as a matter of course and the Boer
War would never have broken out. Rhodes was not only popular among the
Dutch, but also enjoyed their confidence, and it is no secret that he had
courted them to the extent of exciting the suspicions of the ultra-English
party, the Jingo elements of which had openly accused him of plotting with
the Dutch against the authority of Queen Victoria and of wishing to get
himself elected Life President of a Republic composed of the various South
African States, included in which would be Cape Colony, and perhaps even