DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA 259
The
following illustrates the changes which have occurred in the method of
diamond-mining in South Africa in the last thirty years. Up till 1877,
one person could have but two claims in the Kimberley unless he was the
discoverer of a mine, in which case he was entitled to hold two in
addition to his discovery. In the beginning of 1909 the De Beers
Consolidated Mines Company practically own and control the De Beers,
Kimberley, Bultfontein, Dutoitspan, Wesselton and Jagers-fontein mines
entire. In the seventies there were about sixteen hundred individual
owners of the Kimberley, the smallest chimney of the Kimberley group.
The New Premier of the Transvaal, more than four times as large as the
whole Kimberley mine, and equipped now to turn out three to four
million carats per annum, was opened up and is owned by a single
company capitalized at eighty thousand pounds. A digger in the
Kimberley could take up his choice of the free claims, by paying a tax
of ten shillings a week; the De Beers Consolidated Mines Company paid
in 1908 a tax on the profits of 1907 to the Cape Colony amounting to
£302,-174.
Looking
backward, one realizes that the change from separate ownerships to the
united control or single management of an entire chimney was
inevitable. When with increasing depth the reef began to fall in,
covering up claims sometimes with millions of cubic feet of worthless
material which must be taken out at enormous expense before any
further returns could be had from the buried claims, the miners found
that some united action was necessary to insure themselves against
disasters which threatened all, and would be ruinous to those
