What fortunes have been made in this pursuit no one can tell. If they have been great I have not heard of them. There can be no doubt that many have ruined themselves by fruitless labours, and that others who have suddenly enriched themselves have been unable to bear their prosperity with equanimity. The effect of a valuable diamond upon a digger who had been working perhaps a month for nothing was in the early days almost maddening. Now, as with gold in Australia, the pursuit has settled itself down to a fixed industry. Companies have been formed. Individuals are not suddenly enriched by the sudden finding of a stone. Dividends are divided monthly and there is something approaching to a fixed rate of finding from this claim or from that, from this side of the mine or from the other. There is less of excitement and consequently less of evil. Men are no longer prone to the gambler’s condition of mind which induces an individual to think that he,--he specially,--will win in opposition to all established odds and chances, and prompts him to anticipate his winning by lavish expenditure,--to waste it when it does come by such puerile recourses as shoeing a horse with gold or drinking champagne out of a bucket. The searching for gold and diamonds has always had this danger attached to it,--that the money when it has come has too frequently not been endeared to the finder by hard continuous work. It has been “easy come and easy gone.” This to some degree is still the case. There is at Kimberley much more of gambling, much more of champagne, much more of the rowdy exhilaration coming from sudden money, than at older towns of the same or much greater population, or of the same or much greater wealth. But the trade of Kimberley is now a settled industry and as such may be presumed to be beneficent to those who exercise it. Nevertheless there is a stain sticking to the diamonds,--such a stain as sticks to gold, which tempts one to repeat the poet’s caution:-- Aurum irrepertum, et sio melius situm Cum terra celat, spernere fortior, Quam cogere humanos in usus.