principle of the proper relations between the governing and the governed were alike in England and in Venice. In both cases the Dominante, the ruling State, interfered as little as possible with the religion, local customs, and usages of its over-seas dependencies; and in the case of both home and imperial policy the aim of Venice, as expressed by the Venetian Senate, was the aim of England; ut habeamus cor et amorem subditorum nostrorum, that we may hold the heart and affection of our peoples; our great Imperialist, Mr Chamberlain, quoted and endorsed that sentiment in a speech at Glasgow. Both Venice and England reaped their reward in the passionate attachment of their subjects. The mainland possessions of Venice returned, spontaneously and gladly to San Marco, after the wars of Cambrai; the over-seas dominions of Britain rallied to her side during the Great War.

Finally, by a curious coincidence, in the Venetian Calendar the feast of St George of England immediately precedes the feast of 'Glorioso Messer San Marco.'

HORATIO F. BROWN.

Art. 6. THE BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY.

1. Cecil Rhodes. By Basil Williams. Constable, 1921. 2. The Life of Jameson. By Ian Colvin. Two volumes. Arnold, 1922.

3. Special Reference as to the Ownership of the Unalienated Land in Southern Rhodesia. Report of the Lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, July 29, 1918.

4. Colony of Southern Rhodesia. Government Gazette Extraordinary, Oct. 1, 1923, in which is published the Southern Rhodesia Constitution.

And other State Documents.

THE history of the British South Africa Company is one which might serve to remind an age, accustomed to regard the acquisition of territory and the expansion of sovereignties as an affair purely of diplomatic conferences and Inter Allied Councils; of how greatly the British Empire is indebted to the half-' conquistador,' half-commercial spirit of the merchant adventurer. The impulse which took Raleigh and Drake and their light-hearted followers across the Spanish main in search of more or less visionary El Dorados, or which sent the emissaries of the Hudson's Bay Company to hunt or bargain for furs in the frozen north of Canada, was partly the pure zest for discovery, but largely, also, the sense of the 'main chance'; and if it be the possession of this complex spirit that makes our people a nation of shopkeepers, then surely shopkeeping must be the most romantic profession in the world. This spirit was no doubt deliberately encouraged, used, and directed by statesmen bent on founding an Empire strong enough to hold its own against the pretensions to world-power of the Empires first of Spain and then of France, and that with the minimum of risk, responsibility, and expense to the statesmen and the maximum of those inconveniences to the merchant adventurers. But the spirit itself, the efficient cause of Imperial expansion, was that of the adventurers, and the results achieved testify alike to their enterprise and to the sagacity of the politicians who availed themselves of it.

The most notable and, until the end of the 19th

century, the latest result of the process to which we have alluded was the establishment of the British Empire of India. Originating in the enterprise of the East India Company, developed in the course of that Company's struggles in the 18th century with its French rivals in India, and expanded through the inevitable consequences of contact between the civilisation of the Western traders and that of the native races and rulers there, the British Empire of India stood forth after the Mutiny over the grave of John Company. It is the destiny of such companies to die in giving birth; and their political heirs are not usually remarkable for filial piety.

With the disappearance of the East India Company men may well have thought that the age of the adventurer had passed, and that thenceforth there could be no more Elizabethans; but the world still contained a great continent of which the vast and fabled interior was unexplored and had not as yet become a field for the contending policies of Europe. Of Africa, until the end of the 19th century, little was known except the Mediterranean seaboard, the Portuguese ports on the east and west coasts, and the extreme south. The colonisation of the south, first Portuguese, then Dutch, then British, was due in all three cases to the same cause, the need of places of rest and refreshment on the way to and from the Indies; so that the possession of the Cape of Good Hope fell almost inevitably to whatever power was paramount in India. In the last quarter of the 19th century, however, the powers of Europe began to feel that the territory and trade of the interior of Africa were worth having for themselves, and the scramble for the partition of the continent began. So far as its southern portion was concerned the position was that the extreme south was occupied by the British Colonies of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal. North of these lay the primitive and impecunious Boer Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. The territory to the north-west of the Cape Colony, with so much of the Atlantic seaboard as lay south of the Portuguese colony of Angola, had fallen to the German Empire and was known as German South-West Africa. Germany had also acquired the territory known as

German East Africa, now renamed Tanganyika, lying between the Indian Ocean, on which stands the port of Dar es Salaam, and Lake Tanganyika. This territory lies to the north of the Portuguese East African colony of Mozambique, which, in its turn, lies to the north of Natal and to the east and north of the Transvaal. The seaboards, both eastern and western, of South Africa and the adjoining territories were thus completely parcelled out; but there remained the interior stretching away northwards to the unknown regions of the Equator; an interior which was still the domain of powerful native African 'kings' or tribal chiefs, equipped with formidable organisations of savage military power and ruling over, or raiding, the weaker native peoples that surrounded them.

North of the Cape Colony and to the west of the Transvaal lay the country of the Bechuana, now known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate, among whom the most powerful chief was Khama, 'king' of the Bamang wato, an enlightened ruler judged by native standards, who lived to an extreme old age, and whose death only occurred within the last year. Northwards again, between the Limpopo, which formed the boundary of the Transvaal, and the Zambesi-that is to say, in what is now Southern Rhodesia-lay the Matabele, by far the strongest native African military force at this time, since the Zulu power of which the Matabele had originally been an offshoot had been broken in 1879. The chief of the Matabele was the redoubtable LoBengula, a potentate with whom the early history of the British South Africa Company is very closely connected. Beyond the Zambesi and occupying, roughly, the large area lying between that river and its principal northern tributary the Kafue, were the Barotse, another large and powerful tribe, under an able chief named Lewanika, who, like Khama, lived to be an old man and a staunch friend of the British power. To the north and east of Barotseland, and away to the Great Lakes, were a number of native peoples constantly warring with and preying upon one another, and themselves too often the prey of Arab and half-caste Portuguese slave-traders from the east and west coasts, who conducted organised raids into the interior.

As between the European powers interested, the position was that the real control and domination of South Central Africa must fall to whichever could establish its influence and authority over that unknown 'Black North.' The British held the strongest cards. Their command of the sea was complete. In the Cape Colony and Natal they had the only really well-established foci of white civilisation in South Africa, and if they could extend their influence to the North they might hope to join hands with their own countrymen reaching southwards into the interior from Egypt through the Soudan. But the Government of the Cape Colony, responsible to a locally elected Parliament, was parochially minded, supine, and unimaginative. The British Government at Westminster was far off, timid, fearful of extending its responsibilities in any direction, and shy of any project that might involve it in expense. The Government of the German Empire on the other hand, parvenu, restless, ambitious, and with no fear of Parliamentary electorates before its eyes, was unmistakably desirous of reaching across from German South-West to German East Africa, and thus, by establishing a continuous belt of German preponderating influence, if not of actual sovereignty, from west to east, of sundering the British spheres for all time, and of making Germany the dominant factor in the affairs of South Central Africa.

One man there was with the imagination to appreciate and the energy to grapple with the danger. This was Cecil John Rhodes, whose latest biographer, Mr Basil Williams, has given to the public an admirably accurate account of his career, and an appreciation of his character which, if less tinged with the spirit of hero-worship than would have been that of an author personally intimate with him, is perhaps all the more valuable on that account as a judicially impartial contribution to history. Rhodes at the time with which we are dealing was known, so far, only as a prominent figure on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, but was rapidly rising to importance in the Cape Parliament. His doctrine, to which, through good report and ill, he was faithful throughout his life, was that the future of British South Africa lay in the North, and that there was the key to the solution of the problem of welding