Ch. 10: The Essential Combination

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	CHAPTER X

	THE ESSENTIAL COMBINATION has been told why and how the conflicting interests on the Diamond Field were fused in one dominant organization. The signal services of this amalgamation are now too obvious for dispute. By the formation of De Beers Consolidated Mines Limited, it became practicable to design and conduct mining operations systematically and economically and to regulate the output to the market demand. It was soon apparent, too, that the organization of this extraordinary joint stock company was the creation of a power of yet unmeasured service for the development of the resources of South Africa and the push of civilization through the Dark Continent. The only approaches to the far-reaching conception of this organization must be traced back to the old Dutch and English East India companies, or the visionary project of John Law, exploding in air as the Mississippi Bubble. At the outset, on the 12th of March, 1888, a seemingly unpretentious joint stock company was formed and established at Kimberley with a capital of £ 100,000 sterling, divided into twenty thousand shares of £5 each. Authority was granted, however, in the articles of the association, to the shareholders of the company to increase this small capital in general meeting, from time to time, for the acquisition of new property, by creating new shares to any extent, or, in the exact words of article 39 " such amount as may be deemed expedient." No provision for expansion and acquisition could be more liberal, and the particular specifications of the articles of the association show that " new property," 297

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