Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE GREAT EXPANSION I Having described the preliminary steps, I must now follow Mr. Rhodes in his great northern expansion, and try to estimate what it meant to the Colony and the Empire, and what it meant of brain-work and toil to Mr. Rhodes and those who shared his labours. These preliminary steps ultimately secured to the Colony what Mr. Rhodes, as we have already noted, called the key or the gateway to the Hinterland—that is, the large slice of country now called Bechuanaland, equal in area to the Free State and the Transvaal put together. This territory, however, was not what was subsequently named Rhodesia, although it stretched towards and made Rhodesia possible. In one of his speeches Mr. Rhodes has given a lively description of an interview with his Excellency the Governor and High Commissioner, Sir Hercules Robinson, in which he shadows forth his idea of expansion. "We are now," said Mr. Rhodes, "at latitude 22." Sir Hercules responded, "And what a trouble it has been. Where do you mean tostop ?" "I said, ' I will stop where the country has not been claimed.' His Excellency said, 'Let us look at the map.' And I showed him that my scheme extended to the southern border of Tanganyika. He was a little upset. I said, ' The powers at home marked the map and did nothing,' adding, ' Let us try to mark the map, and we all know we shall do something.' ' Well,' said Sir Hercules, ' I think you should be satisfied with the Zambesi as a boundary.' I replied, ' Let us take a piece of notepaper, and let us measure from the Block House at Cape Town to the Vaal River; that is the individual effort of the people. Now,' I said, 'let us measure what you have done in your temporary existence, and then we will finish up by measuring my imaginings.' We took a piece of not...