Our
action in forming the De Beers Investment Trust met with some criticism
in the financial columns of leading newspapers in England. It has been
suggested that it was an innovation which was beyond the scope of the
objects of De Beers. In replying to this criticism, I cannot do better
than quote the last speech made by the late Cecil John Rhodes, when he
presided as chairman at the annual general meeting in 1900. In
answering similar criticisms, he pointed out that the trust deed of the
company had been specifically altered to allow the company to undertake
diverse activities.
'Human
beings,' he said, 'are very interesting. . . . There are those of the
unimaginative type who pass their whole life in filling money bags, and
when they are called upon, perhaps more hurriedly than they desire, to
retire from this world, what they leave behind is often dissipated by
their offspring on wine, women and horses. . . . We have also, I am
glad to say, the imaginative shareholder.' He thanked this class of
shareholder for their support, and then proceeded: 'We have now got the
country developed far, far into the centre of Africa, largely through
the means supplied by this commercial company. If I might go further
and venture to draw a picture of the future, I would say that anyone
visiting these mines 100 years hence, though he saw merely some disused
pits would, if he pushed his travels further into the interior,
recognize the renewal of their life in the great European civilization
of the far north, and perhaps he would feel a glow of satisfaction at
the thought that the immense riches which have been taken out of the
soil have not been devoted merely to the decoration of the female sex.
And so, for my part, when the policy of this corporation is challenged,
I always feel that it is no small thing to be able to say that it has
devoted its wealth to other things besides the expansion of luxury.'
Undoubtedly,
Ernest Oppenheimer could claim that he was carrying on the 'Rhodes
tradition'. Nevertheless, from the business point of view, there is one
point of fundamental difference. It could be said that in the earlier
days of De Beers the extra-diamond activities of that company were not
conspicuously successful financially: the reverse came to be the case
when Ernest Oppenheimer took over.
