Africa as a producer of diamonds seemed, at the time, to be unchallengeable.
There
probably has never been a dynamic group of business leaders in any part
of the world which had, in the space of twenty-odd years, done so much:
there certainly has never been a similar group more subject to
political malice and to religious and racial and social prejudice. The
secular course of history, which dims the detail of the past, has
combined with the lasting impress made upon the British intellectual
mind by the writings of the Radicals of the early twentieth century —J.
A. Hobson, and L. T. Hobhouse, Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc (and, it
may be added, their successors)—to create a composite picture of the
'Randlords'10 which greatly overstresses the homogeneity of
the group and of the personal characteristics of the men who composed
it. In fact, they differed in social, racial, religious and national
origin; they were by no means unanimous as to political objectives;
their business methods were not always identical; there were,
inevitably, sharp rivalries between them and their personal qualities
and qualifications varied greatly. Undoubtedly they desired to make
money— at the end of the nineteenth century it was not yet the fashion
to suppose that the acquisition of wealth necessarily branded a man's
action as antisocial—but some at least among them were quite capable of
taking the long view rather than the short, and of devoting the
fortunes they acquired for public purposes as well as for private
ostentation and gratification. They were a 'group' because they worked
in a field common to them all: they had created a collective organ of
opinion and, to some extent, of action in the shape of the Transvaal
Chamber of Mines, and there were further integrating elements at work
as well.
These
integrating elements consisted, so far as gold is concerned, in a
growing centralization at a high level, of the provision of finance and
of technical and administrative services. The same was true, to
