THIS book is not intended to be an unrelieved panegyric of Rhodes or a tract for the imperialism he preached and worked for. But it frankly sets forth with the belief that he was, with all his grievous faults, a great man, and that at the root of his imperialism were qualities that have done good service to mankind.* His character was cast in a large mould, with enormous defects corresponding with his eminent virtues.
But, from the recital of these short-comings no less than that of his achievements, help, we think, may be gained by those moved by the same spirit of devotion to what they believe best for England and the world. As to his creed of imperialism, a worthy spirit will be engendered if we look, not to the blatant and exaggerated manifestations of national arrogance it contained, but to its deep sense of public duty, the tenacity of purpose it implied, and above all to the underlying sympathy and desire for co-operation even with opponents, without which it was meaningless.
* “Great men are almost always bad men,” wrote the historian Lord Acton in a letter to Mandell Creighton, “even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Yet as John Buchan warned, those who pronounce sentence on history’s ‘great men’ may not always be motivated by such sound principle. See An Embarrassment of Heroes.