50	DIAMOND
	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