craggy mountains of Western America, the arid
plains of West Australia, the ice-bound gorges of the Klondyke, and the
bare slopes of the Witwatersrand veld--these are the lids which cover
the great treasure chests of the world.

Gold had been known to exist in the Transvaal before, but it was only in
1886 that it was realised that the deposits which lie some thirty miles
south of the capital are of a very extraordinary and valuable nature.
The proportion of gold in the quartz is not particularly high, nor are
the veins of a remarkable thickness, but the peculiarity of the Rand
mines lies in the fact that throughout this 'banket' formation the metal
is so uniformly distributed that the enterprise can claim a certainty
which is not usually associated with the industry. It is quarrying
rather than mining. Add to this that the reefs which were originally
worked as outcrops have now been traced to enormous depths, and present
the same features as those at the surface. A conservative estimate of
the value of the gold has placed it at seven hundred millions of pounds.

Such a discovery produced the inevitable effect. A great number of
adventurers flocked into the country, some desirable and some very much
the reverse. There were circumstances, however, which kept away
the rowdy and desperado element who usually make for a newly opened
goldfield. It was not a class of mining which encouraged the individual
adventurer. There were none of those nuggets which gleamed through
the mud of the dollies at Ballarat, or recompensed the forty-niners in
California for all their travels and their toils. It was a field for
elaborate machinery, which could only be provided by capital. Managers,
engineers, miners, technical experts, and the tradesmen and middlemen
who live upon them, these were the Uitlanders, drawn from all the races
under the sun, but with the Anglo-Celtic vastly predominant. The best
engineers were American, the best miners were Cornish, the best managers
were English, the money to run the mines was largely subscribed in
England. As time went on, however, the German and French interests
became more extensive, until their joint holdings are now probably as
heavy as those of the British. Soon the population of the mining centres
became greater than that of the whole Boer community, and consisted
mainly of men in the prime of life--men, too, of exceptional
intelligence and energy.

The situation was an extraordinary one. I h