our diamonds should have taught us the gold mines of the Transvaal were
discovered.
We South Africans, Dutch and English alike, are a curious folk, strong,
brave, with a terrible intensity and perseverance, but we are not a
sharp people well versed in the movements of the speculative world. In
a few years the entire wealth of South Africa, its mines of gold and
diamonds, its coal fields, and even its most intractable lands, from
the lovely Hex River Valley to Magaliesberg, had largely passed into
the hands of a very small knot of speculators. In hardly any instances
are they South Africans. That they were not South African-born would
in itself matter less than nothing, had they thrown in their lot with
us, if in sympathies, hopes, and fears they were one with us. They are
not. It is not merely that the wealth which should have made us one of
the richest peoples in the world has left us one of the poorest, and
is exported to other countries, that it builds palaces in Park Lane,
buys yachts in the Mediterranean, fills the bags of the croupiers at
Monte Carlo, decks foreign women with jewels, while our citizens toil
in poverty; this is a small matter. But those men are not of us! That
South Africa we love whose great future is dearer to us than our
own interests, in the thought of whose great and noble destiny lies
the source of our patriotism and highest inspiration, for whose good
in a far distant future we, Dutch and English alike, would sacrifice
all in the present--this future is no more to them than the future of
the Galapagos Islands. We are a hunting ground to them, a field for
extracting wealth, for