2	SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMER
	seriously distorted the vision of the past, a past which, in fact, calculated in terms of years, is in reality very proximate. The 'long Victorian afternoon', which now seems so infinitely remote in time, virtually came to an end amid the splendours of the Diamond Jubilee of 1897: the opening years of the present century, marked as they were by the bitter struggle in South Africa, inaugurated that period of tension between the 'Great Powers', that 'War of Steel and Gold', to use the apt title of a celebrated book of the time, which led to the First World War and the uneasy years that followed thereon, only to culminate in the final disaster of the Second World War. Yet these are all events which occurred well within the lifetime of a single man: as indeed they did in the active lifetime of Ernest Oppenheimer. They constitute part of the framework within which 'business', by which is here meant the conduct of economic affairs by private individuals and corporations, had and has to be conducted. But these political events were accom­panied by a change of scale in the economic world without parallel in the history of mankind. To certain celebrated writers, indeed, the most representative of whom was the late Mr. J. A. Hobson, the political events and the economic events were the obverse and the reverse of the same medal. The integration of the entire world into one economic system—in the absence of a single world authority—was accomplished by the systematic utilization of the powers of congeries of antagonistic states by selfish and unscrupulous adventurers, playing upon the emotions and ignorance of their fellow-countrymen and moulding pohticians and parliaments for the attainment of their own egotistic end, their end being the acquisition of personal wealth by territorial aggrandizement and the exploitation—by methods in themselves mostly reprehensible—of the agricultural, mineral and human resources of the territories acquired, not indeed in all cases by themselves, but in all cases for their own purposes. Such was the thesis of J. A. Hobson's Imperialism, the first edition of which appeared in 1902. It is necessary to refer to it, not only because of its great significance in the formation of thought in the United Kingdom and elsewhere—it is said to have inspired Lenin—but also because the course of events in Africa south of the Sahara, and in South Africa and Rhodesia in particular, were the chosen 'illustrative models', and Cecil Rhodes and his immediate associates were the representative figures held up to public condem­nation. In the light of this interpretation of world events, the role of the capitalist entrepreneur was simply that of a ruthless adven­turer, and the process of opening up the world—whether in South