mond
men in South Africa, extolling the advantages of solidarity, pointing
out the dangers of a go-it-alone policy, and beg ging them to hold the
price line; he made a tour of England, Holland, Belgium, and France,
carrying the same message to diamond traders wherever he went. As time
passed and the mines remained closed, it began to look as if the whole
industry might collapse, but in the dead hush of the shutdown
Oppen-heimer persevered with such success that when things began to
pick up again he had not only all the former members of the Syndicate
and the alluvial-mine owners lined up behind him but also producers in
the Belgian Congo, West Africa, and the Portuguese colony of Angola,
three regions in which alluvial deposits had only recently been
discovered.
In
1933, Oppenheimer set up a subsidiary firm called the Diamond Trading
Company to serve as the sole channel through which the diamond
producers sold their wares. Inevitably, such an out-and-out and
large-scale monopoly brought cries of indignation from certain
quarters, prompting the South African Government to appoint a
commission to look into the matter, but the commission accomplished
little and was finally disbanded. Oppenheimer was convinced that if the
diamond industry was to survive, it had to be a monopoly. As he saw it,
competition in diamond trading is of necessity unhealthy because of
the limited number of diamond deposits in the world and the hard fact
that there are just so many stones still to be mined; these would soon
all be taken out of the ground if mine operators were given a free
hand, and this, of course, would mean the end of the industry. But it
would not die in a blaze of glory, because while the mining companies
were breathlessly digging away, in furious competition with one
another, and
