Part 1
Extracted from
Nexus Magazine
Volume 12, Number 1
December 2004-January 2005
A Short History of
The Round Table
Cecil
Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond
mining corporation, had a vision of an Imperial
Federation that would re-unify Great Britain and the
United States and globalize the world. |
But for [King] George III, war would have been unknown throughout
the world today. The English-speaking race would have been
reorganized as a unit, with its central Parliament meeting
alternately in New York and London, and it would have given peace to
the world.
- Cecil Rhodes, July 19011
At the end of the 19th century the British Empire was the largest
the world had ever seen, covering some 19 million square kilometers
of territory and nearly a quarter of the world’s population.
Britain
was also the pre-eminent global power, possessing the strongest navy
in the world and the largest merchant fleet and dominating the
global economy as the biggest investor, banker, insurer and
commodity dealer.2 According to Niall Ferguson, author of
Empire:
How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), this Pax Britannica was
not only a force for good, but also the "nearest thing there has
ever been to a world government".3 Perhaps it was, though for the
millions of indigenous peoples who had been colonized, often with
great brutality, and whose lands and natural resources were now
being plundered by the British while they were relegated to the
status of second-class subjects, the benefits of being part of the
British Empire were somewhat elusive.
Yet, despite all these apparent strengths, Britain was no longer at
the peak of its power, a point it reached in the 1870s. Indeed, the
start of the 20th century marked the final phases of its inevitable
decline. The erosion of British power was occurring on two fronts:
first, through the imperial expansion of the other European powers,
which impinged on its military dominance; and second, by the gradual
loss of its industrial and commercial supremacy, upon which its
military might had rested. The British Establishment was already
reading these portents of imperial decay.
The First Lord of the
Admiralty, for example, had warned in 1900 that in coming years
Britain,
"...by itself will not be strong enough to hold its proper
place alongside of the US or Russia and probably not
Germany. We
shall be thrust aside by sheer weight."4
It was in the midst of this pervading sense of gloom that, in 1909,
a movement emerged which sought to preserve British power by
converting its Empire into an "Imperial Federation" or "Imperial
Union".5 This movement was known as
the Round Table.
The Round Table occupies a special place in most populist accounts
of the
New World Order, the group given a pivotal role in the
World
Government conspiracy.
David Icke, for example, writes that the
Round Table "spawned a network of interconnecting groups in many
countries working toward a common aim... world government".3 The
reason for this focus on the Round Table is the rather sensational
analysis of the group provided by Carroll Quigley (1910-1977) in his
1966 book, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. A
professor of history and international relations at Georgetown
University, Quigley discussed the Round Table movement in some
detail, claiming it formed the hub of an "international Anglophile
network" which had exercised disproportionate influence over the
American and British governments for much of the 20th century. More
importantly, he personally confirmed the existence of this alleged
network, citing some 20 years of studying its history, including
gaining exclusive access to its documents over a two-year period;
even claiming that for much of his life he was "close to it and to
many of its instruments".7
For many researchers, Quigley’s personal testimony has seemed reason
enough to repeat his claims without exploring them much further, let
alone without questioning their accuracy. Australian researcher
Jeremy Lee, for instance, suggests Tragedy and Hope "exposed beyond
argument" the existence of the New World Order conspiracy,8 while
numerous other researchers continue to place the Round Table in key
positions in wiring diagrams, linking it to the
Council on Foreign
Relations and Chatham House as though it were still a powerful
organization near or at the top of the New World Order hierarchy.9
It is not the intention of this article to join this consensus
position of uncritically accepting Quigley’s account of the
Round
Table’s power-an acceptance based solely on his still unproven
claims of special access.10 Nor is it the intention to embrace
Gary
Allen’s claim that the Round Table was a "secret society...
dedicated to establishing a world government".11 Equally, this
article avoids the habit of more mainstream historians of minimizing
the role of the Round Table and relegating it to a mere footnote.
Instead, this article endeavors to establish that while Quigley’s
claims contain some elements of truth, the Round Table’s
contribution to the New World Order is more complex than is commonly
supposed.
In fact, the movement is an unlikely participant in the push for
global governance. Founded by advocates of Anglo-Saxon racial and
political superiority, their scheme for imperial federation
originally intended to consolidate the British Empire to protect it
from disintegration and an expected challenge from Germany, the
Round Table, at least initially, represented imperialist rather than
internationalist ideals.
Moreover, despite its apparent wealth and political connections and
an ambitious propaganda program, the Round Table conspicuously
failed to achieve its goal of imperial federation. It also fell
short in its attempts to remold the League of Nations concept into
a form that would support the Round Table’s imperialist ambitions.
The movement would also be beset by divisions between those who
viewed the federation of the British Empire as an end in itself, and
those who believed imperial federation should be a stepping-stone to
world government.
Nevertheless, the movement’s vision of a world ruled by an
Anglo-American federation represented one of the first attempts in
the 20th century by a power-elite clique to bypass democracy in
order to achieve its goal of overriding national sovereignty and
establishing a supranational form of governance. Yet, as this
article seeks to demonstrate, the Round Table movement’s legacy was
not one of success but of failure. Its members’ efforts to arrest
Britain’s decline by unifying the Empire soon proved futile, and
their dream of ruling the world slipped from their grasp.
CECIL RHODES AND HIS IMPERIAL VISION
The Round Table was the product of two people: Cecil Rhodes
(1853-1902) and Lord Alfred Milner (1854-1925).
This was not to be a
living partnership, given Rhodes’s untimely death well before the
Round Table was founded and their limited contacts while he was
alive, but more of a posthumous association in which Milner sought
to realize Rhodes’s dream of a unified British Empire. As prominent
Round Table member Leopold Amery (1873-1955) later observed,
"If the
vision was Rhodes’, it was Milner who over some twenty years laid
securely the foundations of a system whose power...throughout the
English-speaking world...would be difficult to exaggerate".12
While
his claims of the Round Table’s power can be forgiven as wishful
thinking, Amery by no means overstates the importance of Rhodes and
Milner.
Cecil Rhodes is better known as the founder and primary owner of the
famous diamond company, De Beers; as creator of the colonies of
Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and
Zimbabwe); and as
Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896.13
Compelled by
a life-threatening heart condition to leave Britain, Rhodes had travelled in the 1870s to southern Africa where he made his fortune
in the diamond-mining boom in the Kimberley region. It was there
that Rhodes first demonstrated his desire for centralized control.
Rhodes believed the intense competition between the hundreds of
small mining companies was damaging the viability of the diamond
industry. His solution was to establish a company with monopoly
control over the supply of diamonds, thus making it more profitable
in the long term. In 1888 Rhodes realized his vision, collaborating
with share dealer Alfred Beit and the London bankers Nathaniel M.
Rothschild
and Sons to buy out rival mining companies throughout the
Kimberley region. The product of this collusion was a single diamond
mining company, De Beers Consolidated Mines. This bold move gave
Rhodes and his backers "control of the commanding heights of the
Cape economy" (Thomas) and made him, "almost overnight, the most
powerful man in Africa" (Rotberg).14
As Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, Chairman of De Beers and one
of the richest and most aggressive imperialists in southern Africa,
Rhodes commanded considerable power and his exploits earned him the
admiring accolade of "the Colossus of Africa". Driven by an
imperialist fervor, the Colossus embarked on a number of bold
schemes devoted to the expansion and consolidation of British rule
in Africa. Some of these plans were partially successful, such as
the annexation of Matabeleland and Mashonaland in support of the
British South Africa Company’s goal of controlling all the land in
the interior of Africa between the Limpopo and the Nile. Other
schemes, such as his attempt to overthrow the Boer government in the
Orange Free State through the Jameson Raid and his plans for a
trans-African railway stretching from the Cape to Cairo, were for
him personally costly and conspicuous failures.
Yet, in pursuing these various projects, Rhodes was not enacting his
own ideas but using the plans of others to fulfill his broader
vision. As one historian observed:
"Rhodes was not a thinker; he was
doer. He appropriated the ideas of others rather than conceiving
ideas himself."15
Significantly, the only exception to this rule was
his most ambitious grand design of all: imperial federation.
This is not an accepted fact in most accounts, including in
Quigley’s book where the famous British artist John Ruskin is cited
as the sole source of Rhodes’s enthusiasm for imperial federation.
Rhodes is said to have attended the inaugural lecture given at
Oxford in 1870 by Ruskin, then Professor of Fine Arts, and to have
been so inspired that he kept a copy of the lecture with him for the
next 30 years, regarding it as "one of his greatest possessions"
(Quigley).16 The problem with this version of events is that
Rhodes
did not attend Oxford until September 1873, thus obviously missing
Ruskin’s lecture; more importantly, as Rotberg notes, there is
"absolutely no evidence...that Rhodes was ever affected by
Ruskin’s
popularity and the cult which helped spread his message of light,
right and duty".17 There are certainly good grounds for supposing
that Rhodes would have agreed with most of Ruskin’s message that
Britain’s destiny, "the highest ever set before a nation", was to
make it "for all the world a source of light" by founding colonies
"as far and as fast as she is able to".18 There is, however, no
single source of inspiration for Rhodes’s dream of unifying the
British Empire.
The range of influences on Rhodes’s imperial thinking was legion.
His favorite books included the works of Classical Greek and Roman
scholars, such as Aristotle’s Ethics, Plato’s
Republic, Plutarch’s Lives, Marcus Aurelius’
Meditations, and Thucydides’ History, or
were about the Roman Empire-evident in his avid reading and
rereading of Edward Gibbons’s six-volume The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (1776-1788). These books had exposed Rhodes to the
cosmopolitanism of the Stoics and also to arguments extolling
the
virtues of imperialism. From these, it seems, he had concluded that
it was Britain’s destiny to succeed Rome as the ruler of the
world.19
Another key influence was William Winwood Reade’s book, The
Martyrdom of Man (1872), a neo-Darwinian tome which presents a
universal history of humanity supporting the argument that suffering
is necessary to the achievement of progress. Rhodes had read
Martyrdom, describing it as a "creepy book", but he also said,
somewhat ominously, that it had "made me what I am".20
He also found inspiration in the imperialist fervour generated by
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s expansion of the British Empire
in the 1870s. Disraeli himself was an advocate of imperial
federation.
Arguably, it was from this rich concoction of ideas and influences,
rather than from Oxford itself - where he apparently learned
little - that Rhodes had developed his own unique vision of imperial
federation.
RHODES AND HIS "CONFESSION OF FAITH"
Rhodes first put his vision of imperial unity to paper on 2 June
1877 in his handwritten testimony, the so-called "Confession of
Faith". In the Confession, Rhodes stated he had concluded that his
chosen calling in life was not marriage, travel or the accumulation
of wealth, but to make himself useful to his country. Expressing his
belief in the inherent racial and cultural superiority of
Anglo-Saxons, Rhodes argued that only the British should rule the
world:
I contend that we are the finest race in the world and the more of
the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy
those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable of
human beings; what an alteration there would be in them if they were
brought under Anglo-Saxon influence... Added to which the absorption
of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the
end of all wars.21
To this end, Rhodes put forward his own vision of an expanded
British Empire that would be achieved by the formation of a secret
society:
Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the
furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole
uncivilized world under British rule for the recovery of the
United
States for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire. What a dream,
and yet it is probable, it is possible.22
This secret society would have "its members in every part of the
British Empire", including in the schools and universities to select
new members and in the Colonial legislatures, where they would
"advocate the closer union of England and colonies, to crush all
disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire". He
also envisaged this secret society owning "portions of the press,
for the press rules the mind of the people".23
Rhodes’s motivation for creating his own secret society stemmed from
his disappointment and contempt for Freemasonry, which he had
recently joined. His disdain for the Craft had been almost
immediate, demonstrated at his induction banquet in June 1877 where,
as a new life member for the Apollo Chapter of the Masonic Order,
Rhodes scandalized his brethren by casually revealing the mystic
cult secrets of the 33rd Degree Rite.24 In his
Confession, Rhodes
denigrated the Freemasons as an essentially pointless
organization
whose members "devote themselves to what at times appear the most
ridiculous and absurd rites without an object and without an end".
However, this was not a blanket rejection of secret societies, as he
expressed his admiration for
the Jesuits whom he believed had
achieved much despite their "bad cause" and "bad leaders".25
Elements of Rhodes’s Confession were incorporated into his wills, of
which eight were produced over the years as his fortune and
ambitions increased but his cardiovascular problems worsened,
reminding the Colossus that his time in this world was short. His
second will of 19 September 1877, for example, was produced
following a "heart attack" he had suffered in August of that year.26
Although it had only two executors, that document clarified Rhodes’s
essential vision of establishing a "Secret Society" devoted to "the
extension of British rule throughout the world", including the
"ultimate recovery of the United States as an integral part of the
British Empire". This would culminate in:
...consolidation of the whole Empire, the inauguration of a system
of Colonial Representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend
to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally
the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars
impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.27
All that remained was to bring about this desired state of affairs,
and in successive wills Rhodes continuously refined his envisaged
secret society. In a letter accompanying his fourth will, written in
June 1888, Rhodes instructed Lord Nathaniel M.
Rothschild
(1840-1915) - his collaborator and financier at De Beers and to whom
he originally left most of his fortune - to obtain the
Constitution of
the Jesuits and "insert English Empire for Roman Catholic Religion"
so the secret society could use the document as its charter.28
But Lord Rothschild, although a supporter of imperial expansion,
soon proved unworthy of this task. For one, Rothschild failed to
meet Rhodes’s immediate demands for assistance in achieving his
various schemes in Africa. This frustrated the Colossus of Africa,
who had apparently believed in the great power of the Rothschild
name to work the all-too-numerous miracles he required.29
Lord Rothschild also seemed unable to absorb Rhodes’s ultimate
imperial vision. The disappointment was obvious. Rhodes was to
confide to his friend Lord Esher in 1891 that Lord Rothschild,
"...is
absolutely incapable of understanding my ideas. I have endeavoured
to explain them to him, but I could see from the look on his face
that it made no impression... and that I was simply wasting my time."
The fate of Britain’s richest banker was to be removed from
Rhodes’s
subsequent wills and replaced with an anonymous trustee.30
STEAD AND THE "ANGLO-AMERICAN RE-UNION"
Rhodes was to find a more understanding audience through his
friendship with William T. Stead (1849-1912), editor of the
Pall
Mall Gazette and founder of the periodical, Review of Reviews.
Stead
was an ardent supporter of imperialism, conceiving it in Ruskinian
terms of Britain’s moral duty to the rest of the world, which he
defined as the "imperialism of responsibility". He was a supporter
of imperial federation, evident in the avowed purpose of Review of
Reviews of "promoting the re-union of the English-speaking race".31
However, Stead had also been a member of the South Africa Committee,
which was opposed to Rhodes’s brutal methods of expanding British
rule in southern Africa. Nevertheless, it was an article by Stead in
the Pall Mall Gazette, endorsing an "Anglo-American re-union", that
had prompted Rhodes to seek him out during his visit to England in
April 1889. Their subsequent meeting was to have a profound effect
on Stead, who was to put aside his previous reservations and write
excitedly of his newfound admiration for Rhodes, proclaiming that he
had never before "met a man who, upon broad Imperial matters, was so
entirely of my way of thinking". Stead was especially impressed with
Rhodes’s "gorgeous" ideas for the "federation, expansion and
consolidation of the Empire".32
The impact appears to have been mutual, with Rhodes giving Stead a
gift of £2,000 to settle an adverse libel judgment and promising
£20,000 to promote their ideas of imperial federation through the
British media. In time, Rhodes was to show his confidence in
Stead
by naming him a trustee in one his wills.33 Stead was also to have
an impact on the Anglo-American component of Rhodes’s imperial
vision. It is noted by Quigley that Rhodes accepted Stead’s proposal
to modify his vision of imperial federation to make "Washington the
capital of the whole organization or allow parts of the empire to
become states of the American Union".34
According to
Stead’s own
account (and Quigley’s most likely source), it was during Rhodes’s
visit to England in February 1891 that the diamond magnate had
finally:35
...expressed his readiness to adopt the course from which he had at
first recoiled... that of securing the unity of the English-speaking
race by consenting to the absorption of the British Empire in the
American Union if it could not be secured any other way... [H]e
expressed his deliberate conviction that English-speaking re-union
was so great an end in itself as to justify even the sacrifice of
the distinctive features and independent existence of the British
Empire.
This Anglo-American arrangement thus became one of the central
components of his envisaged supranational enterprise, if not an
obsession. Rhodes often blamed King George III for the loss of the
American colonies (see epigraph), and once lamented to Stead that
"if we had not lost America... the peace of the world [would have
been] secured for all Eternity!" The postscript to his will of
September 1893, for example, expressed his belief that the merger of
Britain and the United States would "take the government of the
whole world", leading to the "cessation of all wars and one language
throughout the world".36
Elsewhere, Rhodes envisaged joining the British House of Commons to
the United States Congress, establishing an "Imperial Parliament"
that would sit for five-year periods, alternating between London and
Washington.37
Rhodes’s vision can appear quite idealistic, even naïve, in its
motivations. Quigley contends that Rhodes’s utopian scheme for a
world-dominating Anglo-American Federation was driven not by greed
or other materialist wants but by a sincere belief in Britain’s
mission to spread its culture and values worldwide for the common
good. However, Rhodes also made some quite rational calculations
about British power, particularly its declining economic fortunes.
He recognized that British trade was suffering due to "hostile
tariffs" imposed by America and Europe. As he was to tell Prime
Minister Gladstone, the only logical solution was the "further
acquisition of territory", giving Britain a domain large enough to
maintain tariffs against the rest of the world. "Great Britain’s
position depends on her trade," Rhodes argued, saying that if
Britain did not "take and open up the dependencies of the world
which are at present devoted to barbarism, we shall shut out the
world’s trade".38
Quite simply, Rhodes did not believe that free trade in itself would
benefit Britain unless there were some political action to support
it, preferably in the form of imperial expansion and consolidation.
"Being a Free Trader," he was to write to Stead, "I believe that
until the world comes to its senses you should declare war with
those who are trying to boycott your manufactures." He had been
particularly taken by South African politician Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr’s
proposal, first raised at the 1887 Colonial Conference, of an
Empire-wide two-per-cent tariff against foreign goods.
"The politics
of the next hundred years are going to be tariffs and nothing else," Rhodes proclaimed while Prime Minister of the Cape Colony.
In his
letter to Stead, Rhodes identified the only possible solution:
"You
might finish the [tariff] war by union with America and universal
peace, I mean after a hundred years and a secret society
organized
like [St Ignatius] Loyola’s [founder of the Jesuits]."39
THE NEW WEISHAUPT
In pursuing this course, Rhodes was in many respects one of the
first true modern heirs to Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian
Illuminati. A Professor of Law at the
University of Ingolstadt and a
former a Jesuit priest, Weishaupt created the Illuminati in 1776 to
achieve his radical, utopian goal of transforming society. He
envisaged a world devoid of "princes and nations", in which the
human race would "become one family".40
Rhodes’s similarities with Weishaupt are threefold:
-
first, he came
to the same conclusion as Weishaupt that creating his own secret
society for the purposes of changing elite opinion was the only
means to ensure that his goals could be achieved
-
second, he was
similarly unimpressed by the Freemasons and the Jesuits, yet he
copied their methods
-
finally, his ultimate goal was essentially
the same as Weishaupt, in that he sought to create a world order in
which peace would prevail as divisions would be overcome by a global
civilization, albeit an Anglo-Saxon one
There were a number of important differences, however, with
Rhodes
being influenced by Classical philosophers rather than by the
Enlightenment theorists whom Weishaupt admired; this had made him
into an ardent imperialist rather than the cosmopolitan idealist
that Weishaupt clearly was. Unlike Weishaupt, a radical thinker who
aspired to overthrow the existing political and religious order,
Rhodes sought only to expand and preserve what he regarded as the
absolute pinnacle of human civilization: the British Empire.
Furthermore, Weishaupt was an academic of limited means, whose only
hope of realizing his vision was to use the Illuminati to try to
infiltrate existing centers of power and sway elite opinion. His
ambitious endeavour met with some success, but ultimately ran afoul
of the Bavarian authorities, culminating in his exile and the
banning of the Illuminati.
Rhodes, in contrast, with a controlling stake in southern Africa’s
diamond monopoly, two terms as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and
feted by Britain’s Establishment, had at his disposal enormous
financial and political resources-and, as such, ample opportunity to
act on his ideas without fear of persecution by the state because,
especially in southern Africa, he was the state.
Endnotes
1. Quote attributed to Rhodes in Frederic Whyte, The Life of W. T.
Stead, Jonathan Cape, 1925, vol. II, p. 206. 2. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic
Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987,
pp. 224-226. 3. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Basic
Books, 2003, p. xxiii. 4. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 226-229
(quote on p. 229). 5. Quoted in A. M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics: A Study of Lord
Milner in Opposition and in Power, Anthony Blond, 1964, p. 16; and
Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men: The "Kindergarten" in Edwardian
Imperial Affairs, Duke University Press, 1968, p. 124. 6. David Icke, ...And The Truth Shall Set You Free: The most
explosive book of the 20th century, Bridge of Love, 1995, p. 67. 7. See Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in
Our Time, Angriff Press, 1966–1974, pp. 130-133, 144-153, 950-956;
and Quigley, "The Round Table Groups in Canada, 1908–38", Canadian
Historical Review, September 1962, pp. 204-224. 8. Jeremy Lee, Australia 2000: "What Will We Tell Our Children?",
Pickford Productions, 1997, p. 28. 9. See, for example, David Icke (…And The Truth Shall Set You Free,
p. 151), who places the Round Table at the centre of his diagram,
which is in fact a copy of Stan Deyo’s "Round Table of the Nine"
diagram in his book The Cosmic Conspiracy (West Australian Texas
Trading, 1992, p. 96). Dr John Coleman, in contrast, presents the
Round Table as an offshoot of the Royal Institute for International
Affairs, itself beneath the "Committee of 300"; see Conspirators’
Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300, America West
Publishers, 1992, p. 265. 10. It is hoped that an enterprising researcher will some day
analyse Quigley’s research notes for Tragedy and Hope, now available
at Georgetown University Library, Washington, DC, to assess
Quigley’s claims to privileged access to files of the "international
Anglophile network". 11. Gary Allen with Larry Abraham, None Dare Call It Conspiracy,
Concord Press, 1971, p. 74. 12. Quoted in Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men, pp. 143-144. 13. For biographies of Cecil Rhodes, see: Sarah Gertrude Millin,
Rhodes, Chatto & Windus, 1952; John Flint, Cecil Rhodes, Hutchinson,
1976; Robert I. Rotberg with Miles F. Shore, The Founder: Cecil
Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power, Oxford University Press, 1988; and
Antony Thomas, Rhodes, St Martin’s Press, 1997. 14. See: Thomas, Rhodes, pp. 169-181; Rotberg, The Founder, pp.
180-214; and Rob Turrell, "Rhodes, De Beers and Monopoly", Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, May 1982, pp. 311-343. 15. John S. Galbraith, "Cecil Rhodes and his
’Cosmic Dreams’: A
Reassessment", Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, Winter
1972–73, p. 173. 16. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 130. See also: Flint, Cecil
Rhodes, pp. 27-28; and Millin, Rhodes, p. 29. 17. Rotberg, The Founder, pp. 85-88, 95. Thomas (Rhodes, p. 110),
recognizing that Rhodes arrived three years too late to see Ruskin,
still speculates that "no doubt, he would have read the published
text" of Ruskin’s speech. 18. Quoted in Flint, Cecil Rhodes, pp. 27-28. 19. Rotberg, The Founder, p. 95. 20. ibid., pp. 99-100 (including quote). 21. Quoted in Flint, Cecil Rhodes, pp. 248-249. 22. Quoted in Millin, Rhodes, p. 32. 23. Quoted in Flint, Cecil Rhodes, pp. 250-251. 24. Rotberg, The Founder, pp. 101, 102.
25. "Confession" quoted in Flint, Cecil Rhodes, p. 249. 26. Rotberg, The Founder, pp. 101-102. The "heart attack", which is
alleged to have occurred while Rhodes was in Oxford, is an unusual
incident. His friends reportedly found Rhodes barricaded in his room
"blue with fright" and insisting that "he had seen a ghost" (ibid.,
p. 102). 27. Quoted in ibid., pp. 32-33 (emphasis added). 28. ibid., p. 233. 29. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker,
1848–1998, Penguin Books, 2000, vol. II, pp. 360-362, 523 fn13
(including Rhodes quote). 30. Quoted in Rotberg, The Founder, p. 316.
31. Quoted in Estelle W. Stead, My Father: Personal & Spiritual
Reminiscences, William Heinemann, 1913, p. 154. 32. Rotberg, The Founder, pp. 281-282; quotes in Stead, My Father,
pp. 234, 236. 33. Rotberg, The Founder, p. 282. 34. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 133. 35. Quoted in Stead, My Father, p. 239. 36. Rhodes to Stead quoted in Millin, Rhodes, p. 172; Rhodes’s will
quoted in Rotberg, The Founder, p. 666. 37. Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American
Ironies, Chatto & Windus, 1990, pp. 299-300. 38. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pp. 130-131; Rhodes quoted in Millin,
Rhodes, p. 171. 39. Quoted in Millin, Rhodes, pp. 172-175. 40. Quoted in Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval, Talisman: Sacred
Cities, Sacred Faith, Michael Joseph, 2004, p. 379.
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