172
SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMER
for
in section 115 of the Act. It was considered necessary to implement the
'main principle' by prohibiting a corporate body or an association of
two or more persons from holding a claim licence or digger's
certificate unless rights or interests had been acquired prior to 1
July 1926, or unless such corporate body or association held valid
certificates as discoverers or owners in terms of the new legislation
or certificates valid under prior legislation. These were, at first
sight, valuable concessions: their value was much diminished by the
fact that mam' syndicates had acquired rights after 1 July
1926, and these rights were now withdrawn. Moreover, in another respect
the proposed legislation interfered seriously with de facto acquired
rights. By section 20 of the proposed legislation, if the Minister so
ruled, land subdivided after 30 June 1926 was to carry no more
discoverer's claims and owner's claims than if the land had not been
subdivided, thus sweeping away acquired rights on a large scale, since
it was after June 1926 that activity in the subdivision of farms and
the acquisition of owner's rights by syndicates had been most active.
Subdivision, per se, may have, as the Minister urged,
encouraged wide speculation in the Lichtenburg area, but retrospective
interference with rights legally acquired at the time of acquisition
was not necessarily the most equitable way of dealing with the problem.
Though
the bill went even further in the interests of the alluvial digger, by
providing for the creation at the discretion of the Minister of
so-called 'restricted alluvial diggings' in which areas no claimholdcr
was allowed to employ more than twenty persons in the working of his
claim or claims, nevertheless the Minister was forced to recognize that
in certain cases it would be impossible to work alluvial
diggings on the simple principles of economic democracy. The Minister,
by section 94 of the legislation, might, therefore, lease the right to
win precious stones to the discoverer or to any other person or to any
company or he might sell such rights by auction or otherwise.
Further, by section 75, the power was given 'to declare any
proclaimable or proclaimed land or any unalienated Crown land to be a
State mine or alluvial digging'. The State had, of course, in the early
days of the diamond fields, acquired in May 1875 the farm
'Vooruitzicht' from Dunell, Ebden and Company, and thus became the
ground landlord of important mining property, but the suggested State
diggings were a revolutionary innovation with far-reaching
implications, in so far as it meant that the State was henceforward not
merely interested in the diamond industry as tax gatherer and guardian
of the national
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