After the Queen's flag had been hoisted at Pretoria, Cecil Rhodes alive would have proved an anomaly in South Africa.

Cecil Rhodes dead would still retain his position as a dreamer and a thinker, a man who always pushed forward without heeding the obstacles, forgetful of aught else but the end he was pursuing, the country which he loved so well, and, what he cared for even more, his own ambition.

Men like Rhodes--with all their mistakes to mar their dazzling successes--cannot be replaced; it is just as difficult to take up their work as it is to fill the gap caused by their disappearance.
CONCLUSION I have come to the end of what I intended at first to be a book of recollections but which has resolved itself into one of impressions.

A more competent pen than mine will one day write the inner history of this South African War, which by an anomaly of destiny had quite different results from those expected.

So many things have occurred since it happened that the whole sequence of events, including the war, is now looked upon by many people as a simple incident in a long story.
In reality the episode was something more than that.