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WORLD CRISIS AND WORLD LEADERSHIP 277
circumstances
which have resulted in the existing state of the industry, and to make
recommendations as to the steps which should be taken in the public
interest.
Of this proposal, and of the sequence of events which followed, more will be said below.
Lastly, he made Ernest Oppenheimer directly the cause of the general attitude of the Government:
Let
me now explain why the Government carefully examined the agreement
which the companies signed. We have had the spectacle in South Africa
that there is one man who is chairman of all the producing companies in
South Africa, that the same man is chairman of the Diamond Corporation.
He alone is the centre of the whole diamond industry, and, moreover, he
advocates his own case in this House. The fact is that the Hon. Member
for Kimberley can juggle, manipulate and deal with all the diamonds as
he pleases, and all the men whom he brings over from overseas amount to
nothing, because he turns them all round his thumb. It is necessary for
the Government to take this great industry under its protection, and
that the interests of the public in general should not be lost sight
of. That is why the Government must investigate all those contracts so
closely to see that the interests of the country are not given away.18
Why
Ernest Oppenheimer should choose to ruin his shareholders and himself
(to say nothing of the interests of his pohtical career) by 'giving
away' diamonds which, under the actual conditions of the world, were
simply not saleable, was not explained. For the moment, it was clear,
the entente with the Government had broken down.
Though
the attack on Ernest Oppenheimer was couched in quite unnecessarily
personal terms, it does serve to emphasize the dominant position which
he had attained. Even thirty years after the event, it is not easy to
view the attitude of Government without impatience. Yet allowance must
be made for the real difficulties with which they had to contend. The
financial and economic crisis through which the world was passing,
though it was the ultimate cause of South African difficulties, must
have seemed remote to men struggling with the further threat to
employment and fiscal instability implied in the closing down of the
entire diamond-mining industry. The world of capitalism has
traditionally been an object of suspicion and dislike to an important
section of South African opinion and not South African
18 He expressly denied the existence of a crisis: 'I do not allow myself any longer to be stampeded by those bogies. If we do not do exactly what the large producers want, then it is immediately said that we are allowing the market to collapse.'
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