habits
or relinquish ancient hopes. Wasn't the famous Jonker diamond found by
a digger like themselves—only a few years back, in 1934—practically
picked up from the sand, lying there like a common pebble near the deep
Premier Mine of Pretoria? The Cullinan was a deep-mine stone, but the Jonker is different; it has become the diggers' talisman.
Most
directors of the De Beers Consolidated Mines Company don't care very
much nowadays for the idea of digging as these hopeful men are doing
for water-deposited diamonds. They feel that the practice is
small-scale, archaic, and bothersome to a system that has been
painfully built up io produce, market, and uphold the price of
diamonds. Digging is picturesque; that they do not deny, but it is
anachronistic. However, nobody with experience of life in
diamondiferous country has any illusions about the hold it takes on the
human imagination. A digger is a gambler of a special sort, as
confirmed an addict to chance as is any regular horse player. The
company when it tries to discourage the digging habit is up against
something of the same sort of problem faced by Nationalist China's
government some years ago when it outlawed opium smoking. Addiction
cannot be cured simply by decree, as the Chinese authorities
soon discovered, and so they decided upon slow withdrawal of the drug
instead. Not even that could be called an unqualified success. What really licked the opium habit in China was the fact that it ultimately became démodé. Young
Chinese rather scorned the "Big Smoke" because it was so old-fashioned
compared with getting drunk, and something of this sort may overtake
diamond digging in South Africa. At any rate De Beers hopes so. In the meantime the company has devised a system
