claims
during the last few weeks—not because their compound is open but
because we hear there is any amount of liquor to be had there and a
large number of boys will have their liquor at any price—it is the only
thing they live for. For this reason we are increasing the supply of
liquor to the boys for a couple of weeks to see if this has the effect
of making the boys less anxious to get special passes out to the
location, as if they go out simply to obtain liquor, which in the
greater number of cases is the reason for getting out, it will be
better for us to let them have more in the compound if it will keep
them in." He added a few days later, in an uneasy note, "From a moral
point of view of course brandy is all wrong, but we are a Diamond
Mining Company, not a Temperance Society."
Whitworth
continued to have trouble with his labor. He tried out various methods
of distributing the brandy that was to keep the boys contented, but
some of the leaders outwitted him and cornered the supply. He went on
fighting for a new system of feeding them, and at last won out. Then
sickness struck the mine and traveled with horrible speed through the
compound, so that Whitworth listed a number of deaths every day. A
government doctor came to inspect the sanitary arrangements and said
the authorities were doing as well as could be expected—which, though
probably true, was qualified praise: not much was expected of mine
authorities in those days. Yet boys still presented themselves in
ragged little bands or in solitude, asking for the work they had
become used to, and native chiefs still sold indenture rights in the
bodies of other less sophisticated boys, and various independent
companies continued to poach labor from each other until the Boer War
suspended all activities. Whitworth lived to see a transforma-
