Mr. Rhodes died at his house near Capetown at six o'clock yesterday evening. A fatal issue of his illness had for some weeks been apprehended.

Cecil Rhodes, fourth son of the Rev. F. Rhodes, vicar of Bishop Stortford, Herts, was born at that place on the 5th of July, 1853, and received the usual school of his class. He is recorded to have won prizes in classics, mathematics, divinity - doubtless, on a paternal stimulus,- and French, besides taking in 1869 a classical scholarship. It was in 1871 that he was first sent to South Africa, where, on this visit, he joined his brother Herbert in Natal, going on later to the Kimberley diamond mines, then just opened.

In the following year he returned to England and matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford; but in 1874, catching a severe chill while rowing, he developed such a serious inflammation of the lungs that he was pronounced unable to live more than a few months even in South Africa, whither, however, he at once proceeded, to gain the last chance. Proceeding to Kimberley, where his brother had now settled, he soon made a good recovery, and threw himself energetically into many money-making undertakings besides diamond mining. The result was that, unlike his brother Herbert, who spent much of his time in hunting and finally met his death by the burning of a hut, Cecil grew speedily rich.

The residual truth is that, led on by his special bent for territorial expansion - which took the grandiose shape of an ideal of British occupation of all Central Africa and a "Cape to Cairo railway," - Rhodes was yet constantly concerned in financial schemes which implicated him with all sorts of unscrupulous spirits, with the result that he became in many respects as unscrupulous as they. It is often told of him as a man that, while he was a genial and comfortable colleague, he would stick at few things to achieve a purpose.

His dream of colonising "Rhodesia," for which his Company obtained its charter in 1889, may have been at first imperialistic in a disinterested sense - indeed it was never the project of a pure man of business; but when the years passed and the huge capital invested in the scheme showed no signs of yielding a return, he had to give himself more and more to a money-seeking policy. At best is conception of civilisation was empirical, if not vulgar, and in course of time most other ideals had for him to be sub-ordinated to that of keeping up dividends.

It is from the date of the Jameson Raid, 1895, that Rhodes's career becomes definitely that of a wrecker instead of a constructor of South African development. There is no reason to doubt that he was originally, as a biographer claims, a believer in "commerce and industrialism as opposed to militarism"; but when the capitalistic class of Johannesburg, to whom he was in so many ways bound, forced on a policy of agitation for political reforms which should be a means to lessening their expenses and increasing their earnings from the mines, he was in no position to withstand them.

It may be left to the future historian who shall have access to the documents to determine his share in the guilt of the Raid. Certain it is that he vacillated long in sore perplexity, and it may be that his message to Jameson had been misunderstood by that unlucky strategist. But the fact remains that when, in November 1895, the British Government gave control of the southern portion of Bechuanaland to Cape Colony and the northern to the Chartered Company - a sinister act, giving colour to many imputations - the Johannesburg agitation boiled up afresh, and Rhodes gave Jameson his orders to collect the Company's troops and prepare for an expedition with Maxim guns. From that unscrupulous beginning there was an unbroken sequence of evil.