It is useless to deny that he had arrived at Cape Town with considerable prejudice against Rhodes.

He could not but look interrogatively upon the political career of a man who at the very time he occupied the position of Prime Minister had lent himself to a conspiracy against the independence of another land.

Moreover, Rhodes was supposed, perhaps not without reason, to be continually intriguing to return to power, and to be chafing in secret at the political inaction which had been imposed upon him, and for which he was himself responsible more than anyone else.

The fact that after the Raid Rhodes had been abandoned by his former friends harmed him considerably as a political man by destroying his renown as a statesman to whom the destinies of an Empire might be entrusted with safety.

One can truly say, when writing the story of those years, that it resolved _itself_, into the vain struggle of Rhodes to recover his lost prestige.