The earliest instance I can find of this quotation appears in 1976, in K. Tjabavu’s Zimbabwe, Rhodesia: Guidelines to National Liberation, page 3. In that journal, the quotation continues, “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If we want to avoid class struggle in the United Kingdom, we must become imperialists.” These words strongly suggest that the quotation is a garbled rendition of Vladimir Lenin’s words when he attempts to quote Cecil Rhodes in his Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). In its English translation, this is the quote: “My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” Lenin’s source, one M. Beer in the German periodical Neue Zeit, actually quotes (and translates into German) The History of the Mystery (1897), by the journalist W. T. Stead. Stead was a friend, confidante, and promoter of Rhodes. But The History of the Mystery isn’t exactly history—it’s a novel, a fictionalized account of the Jameson Raid. And Stead isn’t exactly quoting his friend Rhodes; rather, he’s putting a reconstruction of Rhodes’s thinking into the mouth of a fictional character based upon Rhodes, “Robert J. Cecil.” The actual quotation from the novel: “My great idea is the solution of the social problem, which, being interpreted, means that in order to keep your forty millions here from eating each other for lack of other victuals, we beyond the seas must keep open as much of the surface of this planet as we can for the overflow of your population to inhabit, and to create markets where you can dispose of the produce of your factories and your mines. The Empire, I am always telling you, is a bread-and-butter question. If you have not to be cannibals, you have got to be imperialists.” So: Stead’s recollection of Rhodes’s ideas, almost certainly not a direct quotation, was published in 1897; the Neue Zeit (the same year) translated this; Lenin then quoted the German (in Russian, of course); the Russian was later translated back to English; by 1976, someone got ahold of that translation and paraphrased it—badly and certainly maliciously—and then represented it as a direct quotation. The major difference between Stead’s quotation (as well as Lenin’s) and the one clearly derived from it, of course, is that the nasty words about “cheap slave labour” aren’t there—and indeed, make no sense in the context of the original. I’m not a fan of Cecil Rhodes—but that bogus addition is clearly nothing short of defamatory. Defamatory—and effective: Since the 1970s that quotation—stated as Rhodes’s actual words—has appeared in dozens of books, and thousands of times on the Internet: usually quoted as Exhibit A in vilifying Rhodes and British Imperialism. This “quotation” should be Exhibit A, rather, in demonstrating the dangers of quoting quotes from secondary sources as absolutely true.
