All must be men of ability and character.... Rhodes envisages a group of the ablest and
the best, bound together by common unselfish ideals of service to what seems to him the
greatest cause in the world. There is no mention of material rewards. This is to be a kind
of religious brotherhood like the Jesuits, ‘a church for the extension of the British
Empire.’"
In each of his seven wills, Rhodes entrusted his bequest to a group of men to carry out
his purpose. In the first will, as we have seen, the trustees were Lord Carnarvon and
Sidney Shippard. In the second will (1882), the sole trustee was his friend N. E.
Pickering. In the third will (1888), Pickering having died, the sole trustee was Lord
Rothschild. In the fourth will (1891), W. T. Stead was added, while in the fifth (1892),
Rhodes's solicitor, B. F. Hawksley, was added to the previous two. In the sixth (1893)
and seventh (1899) wills, the personnel of the trustees shifted considerably, ending up, at
Rhodes's death in 1902, with a board of seven trustees: Lord Milner, Lord Rosebery,
Lord Grey, Alfred Beit, L. L. Michell, B. F. Hawksley, and Dr. Starr Jameson. This is the
board to which the world looked to set up the Rhodes Scholarships.
Dr. Frank Aydelotte, the best-known American authority on Rhodes's wills, claims
that Rhodes made no reference to the secret society in his last two wills because he had
abandoned the idea. The first chapter of his recent book,
change in his point of view and matured in his judgment to the point that in his sixth will
"he abandons forever his youthful idea of a secret society." This is completely untrue, and
there is no evidence to support such a statement.(2) On the contrary, all the evidence,
both direct and circumstantial, indicates that Rhodes wanted the secret society from 1875
to his death in 1902. By Dr. Aydelotte's own admission, Rhodes wanted the society from
1877 to 1893, a period of sixteen years. Accepted practice in the use of historical
evidence requires us to believe that Rhodes persisted in this idea for the remaining nine
years of his life, unless there exists evidence to the contrary. There is no such evidence.
On the other hand, there is direct evidence that he did not change his ideas. Two
examples of this evidence can be mentioned here. On 5 February 1896, three years after
his sixth will, Rhodes ended a long conversation with R. B. Brett (later Lord Esher) by
saying, "Wish we could get our secret society." And in April 1900, a year after he wrote
his seventh and last will, Rhodes was reprimanding Stead for his opposition to the Boer
War, on the grounds that in this case he should have been willing to accept the judgment
of the men on the spot who had made the war. Rhodes said to Stead, "That is the curse
which will be fatal to our ideas—insubordination. Do not you think it is very disobedient
of you? How can our Society be worked if each one sets himself up as the sole judge of
what ought to be done? Just look at the position here. We three are in South Africa, all of
us your boys . . . I myself, Milner, and Garrett, all of whom learned their politics from
you. We are on the spot, and we are unanimous in declaring this war to be necessary. You
have never been in South Africa, and yet, instead of deferring to the judgment of your
own boys, you fling yourself into a violent opposition to the war."(3)
Dr. Aydelotte's assumption that the scholarships were an alternative to the secret
society is quite untenable, for all the evidence indicates that the scholarships were but one
of several instruments through which the society would work. In 1894 Stead discussed
with Rhodes how the secret society would work and wrote about it after Rhodes's death
as follows: "We also discussed together various projects for propaganda, the formation of
libraries, the creation of lectureships, the dispatch of emissaries on missions of
propaganda throughout the Empire, and the steps to be taken to pave the way for the
foundation and the acquisition of a newspaper which was to be devoted to the service of
the cause." This is an exact description of the way in which the society, that is the Milner
Group, has functioned. Moreover, when Rhodes talked with Stead, in January 1895,
about the scholarships at Oxford, he did not abandon the society but continued to speak
of it as the real power behind the scholarships. It is perfectly clear that Rhodes omitted
mentioning the secret society in his last two wills because he knew that by that time he
was so famous that the one way to keep a society from being secret would be to mention
it in his will. Obviously, if Rhodes wanted the secret society after 1893, he would have
made no mention of it in his will but would have left his money in trust for a legitimate
public purpose and arranged for the creation of the secret society by a private