|
184 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
a
crafty politician and a religious exhorter, a Covenanter of the
Covenanters, a Boer of the Boers, uncouth, unschooled, conceited,
bigoted, grasping, bristling with suspicion and prejudice, tickled with
gross flattery, but a man of iron nerve, intensely loyal to his people
and their push for independence, self-contained, self-reliant, bold,
wary, cunning, ambitious, dominating, forehanded— masking his plans,
biding his time, resolute in action, and far-seeing in shaping the
future of his Republic. In the inclusion of the precious
diamond-bearing province in Griqualand West, an inveterate antagonist
of British Imperial extension was raised to power, whose keen forecast
was almost able to overbalance the impulse of this great accession to
the upbuilding of Greater Britain in South Africa.1 On the
coat of arms of the Transvaal Republic a lion lay crouching, ready to
spring. From the day of Kruger's rise to head the Republic, the lion of
the Transvaal has never shut his eyes nor feared to show his teeth.
While
this protracted controversy for the control of the Diamond Fields was
dragging on, the rush to the diggings had been spreading and moving
from the ports of Australia, India, and China; from California, Canada,
and the Eastern Atlantic states of the American Union — from Great
Britain and Ireland and the countries of Western and Central Europe;
from every region of the civilized world, at length, where men of
restless and sanguine temper were living, who could command the price
of the passage to diamond-bearing placers, unmeasured in number,
extent, and richness. The virgin fields of California and Australia,
once so glittering with gold and so potent in attraction, had lost
their glamour with the scouring of their sands and the passing of their
novelties. It had been demonstrated with plain, cold figures and dismal
accuracy that the average farmer was getting far more from his wheat
or potato patch than the average prospector from his scramble in a
gold-field. But who could calculate, or even pretend to predict with
any assurance, the pros-
1 " South Africa," Theal. "Impressions of South Africa," James Bryce. " The Story of South Africa," William Basil Worsfold. " Cecil John Rhodes," Biography, " Imperialist."
|
||
|
|
||