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 OCCUPATION OF EHODE8IA. The preservation of Bechuanaland, the direct trade route into the interior from the Cape, the key to the dreamed-of Empire of the North, had been, as I have shown, the work of Mr. Ehodes, during his Deputy-Commissionership in 1884, and his resolute grip upon the key of South Africa had been finally made effectual by the Warren Expedition. Germany had been encouraged by a growing ambition for colonial expansion to aim not only at acquiring the Transvaal but also the Empire to the North. This, as not even the Portuguese had any effective occupation, was open to the forcible attentions of the first comer in that scramblefor territory in Africa, which had already begun among the powers of Europe. That Mr. Ehodes should have been fully aware that the old Boer was right who described to him the strip of territory in Bechuanaland seized by President Kruger's people as the key of South Africa, seems the merest matter of course to-day. Yet we have. only to look at Froude's Oceana, written after he had visited the Cape in December, 1884, immediately after Mr. Ehodes's intervention, to see how little a man of great ability, and even some real knowledge of South Africa, appreciated the significance of the Boer filibusters' action. Froude seems to have been utterly unconscious of the value of Bechuanaland, and did not even dream of the possibility of expansion to the North, while Warren's expedition would be, he thought, merely mischievous, if it were not ridiculous. Of course Mr. Ehodes knew his South Africa better, and, with his eye on the longed-for region to the North, would onno account let the road to the North pass from under the British flag; but the danger was a real one, for in Zululand, where Boer filibusters had at that tim...