as
well and crowd them out. But Barnato won the election and became M.P.
for Kimberley at the Cape. He said it was "the Dutch"—the Boers—who
elected him; that he had been doing business with them ever since he
arrived in the Fields, and that though they were keen, cunning traders
Barney Barnato was a match for them, and they respected his quality.
What
with fancy-dress electioneering, dramatics, and his success altogether,
he must have continued to be an irritation to the more pernickety of
his clubfellows. But in spite of his ebullient nature and all his
resistance, respectability crept up on Barnato. He became the father of
a family and a power in London's financial circles. These things sober
a man. He never went so far as to collect oil paintings, but he did
build a house in Park Lane, a pretentious gesture he had always sworn
he would avoid. The porch of the mansion was supported by two stone
figures, commonly known in the City as the Petrified Shareholders.
Barnato also set up a racing stable in England and, given the time,
might even have endowed a library. Instead, he went mad.
No
one knows exactly what caused Barnato's madness, but two of the
contributing factors were undoubtedly the Kaffir Circus and the Jameson
Raid. In 1886, gold had been discovered on the Rand, near
Johannesburg, in the Transvaal. Within a few years, both Rhodes and
Barnato had made heavy investments in the gold mines; Rhodes at one
time was receiving four hundred thousand pounds a year from his gold
holdings, and although Barnato's income from the Rand is not known, his
holdings eventually employed twenty thousand whites and a hundred
thousand natives. In September 1895, there were spec-
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