RHODES’S DREAM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 May 1938, Page 2

RHODES’S DREAM

WORLD UNDER BRITISH RULE MEANS TO END ALL WAR It is instructive at the present time to consider what Cecil Rhodes said at various periods of his life on universal peace, says the “Manchester Guardian." In 1877, in a letter to W. T. Stead, he set out his political creed: “I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more we inhabit the better it is for the human race. The absorption of the world under our rule simply means the end of all war.” He states that it is his object to work “for - the bringing of the whole civilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race into one Empire.” In his first will, made in the same year, he provides for a secret society, on the model of the Jesuits, to promote this end. “The whole continent of Africa,” says a biographer of this modern Loyola, “is to be settled by Britons, and also the whole continent of South America, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China, and Japan, and, finally, the United States. In- the end Great Britain is to establish a Power so overwhelming that wars must cease and the milennium be realised.” This ideal Rhodes further elaborated in a series of wills, made at various periods of his life; till at last his aircastle took mundane shape in the Rhodes Scholarships. But how fantastic, how much in the manner of Aristophanes, must appeal’ at the present hour that touch about the “seaboard of China and Japan.”