"The Transvaal and the Boers," an interesting volume by William Garrett Fisher, says of the pre-eminence of Mr. Kruger in the official decision settling this matter that the great and good man said, with the wisdom inherited from generations of ancestors who had studied the encyclopedias of Nature: "Stop and think what you are doing before you open fresh gold fields. Look at Johannesburg, what a nuisance and expense it has been to us! We have enough gold and gold seekers in this country already; for all you know there may be a second Rand at your very feet." These momentous words in the aid of higher destinies were addressed to the Volksraad, and there was no more countenancing the idea of digging for gold. [Sidenote: Gold Found in 1854] In 1854 there was a find of the obnoxious yellow metal in the Boer country, but it was hushed up on the great principle announced with such simple sublimity by the grand old President when the horrors of prosperity broke in upon the contentment of his people and caused the "nuisance" at Johannesburg, where fifty thousand white men rushed in and gave the Boers more trouble to make them "servants of servants" according to the curse of Cain than millions of blacks had done, whose lives were ordered upon even more primitive and economical lines than presented by the secondary rulers of the golden lands. However, it cannot be denied that from the standpoint of the Boers, the British are not to be tolerated when they assume that they have "certain inalienable rights," for they make themselves an abomination, obstreperous in the preliminaries of their educational reduction to the condition of the serfs of semi-barbarians. The objection undoubtedly is good against the British that they are fond of lands where gold is found, and they obstinately support the yellow metal as the standard of value, notwithstanding that they are by their ubiquitous commerce and enduring egotism forcing the yellow metal as the true standard upon the great nations of the earth. Diamonds do not play the great part in the forces that form governments and shape the destinies of peoples in South Africa or elsewhere, that gold does. While the precious stone is useful in the arts, excellent as a tool, and adorns beauty with the beautiful in the highest degree, it does not find its way diffusively into the service of the people generally. Diamonds are not a popular production. They are for a class and not for the mass. The four hundred million dollars worth of glittering stones picked up and dug up in South Africa within a few years, have not affected the measure of value. The finding of gold in such quantities as to over-pass largely and permanently the consumption of it, affects the money standard by which is valued all that the fields and shops produce; that is, all that comes of perseverance in toil that is productive. [Sidenote: Diamonds of not so great importance is Gold]