None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen,
or half its cussedness; but we can try.
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
The Duke of Fife has borne testimony that Mr. Rhodes
deceived him. That is also what Mr. Rhodes did
with the Reformers. He got them into trouble,
and then stayed out himself. A judicious man.
He has always been that. As to this there was
a moment of doubt, once. It was when he was
out on his last pirating expedition in the Matabele
country. The cable shouted out that he had gone
unarmed, to visit a party of hostile chiefs.
It was true, too; and this dare-devil thing came near
fetching another indiscretion out of the poet laureate.
It would have been too bad, for when the facts were
all in, it turned out that there was a lady along,
too, and she also was unarmed.
In the opinion of many people Mr. Rhodes is South
Africa; others think he is only a large part of it.
These latter consider that South Africa consists
of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg
gold fields, and Cecil Rhodes. The gold fields
are wonderful in every way. In seven or eight
years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred
thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together;
and not the ordinary mining city of wooden shanties,
but a city made out of lasting material. Nowhere
in the world is there such a concentration of rich
mines as at Johannesburg. Mr. Bonamici, my manager
there, gave me a small gold brick with some statistics
engraved upon it which record the output of gold from
the early days to July, 1895, and exhibit the strides
which have been made in the development of the industry;
in 1888 the output was $4,162,440; the output of the
next five and a half years was (total: $17,585,894);
for the single year ending with June, 1895, it was
$45,553,700.
The capital which has developed the mines came from
England, the mining engineers from America.
This is the case with the diamond mines also.
South Africa seems to be the heaven of the American
scientific mining engineer. He gets the choicest
places, and keeps them. His salary is not based
upon what he would get in America, but apparently upon
what a whole family of him would get there.
The successful mines pay great dividends, yet the
rock is not rich, from a Californian point of view.
Rock which yields ten or twelve dollars a ton is
considered plenty rich enough. It is troubled
with base metals to such a degree that twenty years
ago it would have been only about half as valuable
as it is now; for at that time there was no paying
way of getting anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained
“free” gold; but the new cyanide process
has changed all that, and the gold fields of the world
now deliver up fifty million dollars’ worth of
gold per year which would have gone into the tailing-pile
under the former conditions.
