industry has a direct tendency to stimulate that
industry and to create other subsidiary industries with their travellers
on business and travellers for pleasure. If railways ran over the
Karroo, adventurous capitalists would come from all ends of the earth to
see it; they would buy land when they found a convenient mode of running
their produce to the markets of the large towns and the ports on the
coast; they would start ostrich farms and breed horses, and grow wool,
and build mighty dams, and sink artesian wells, as the French have done
with some success I believe in Algiers. If railways were run up to the
diamond-fields, adventurous diggers would crowd in hundreds to the great
pit of Kimberley; some would succeed; those who failed would gravitate
into the positions for which they were fitted by nature in a land where
the want of labourers is a confessedly perplexing evil. The population
would not only be increased by much new blood from without, but by that
which results from prosperity and wealth within; off shoot, and as yet
unimagined, enterprises would probably become numerous; additional lines
would be pushed on into the gold regions; all sorts of precious gems and
minerals, including "black diamonds," are known to be abundant in the
Transvaal, and,--but why go on? Those who agree with me understand
these matters so well as to require no urging. As for those who don't
agree:

"The man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still."

What I have written is for the benefit of those who know little or
nothing about South Africa. I will only add to it my own conviction,
[see note 1], that the day is not far distant when a Cape man will
breakfast one morning in Capetown, and dine next day at Port Elizabeth,
(510 miles), run on to Grahamstown, (84 miles), to sup with a friend
there take the early train to Graaff-Reinet, (160 miles), so as to have
time for luncheon and a chat with a friend or relation before the
starting of the night train for Kimberley, (280 miles), where he has to
assist at the marriage of a sister with a diamond-digger who intends to
spend his honeymoon at the Cliff Hotel amid the romantic scenery of the
Catberg, and finish off with a week or two at Snowy Retreat, a
magnificent hotel, (yet to be), on the tiptop of the Compassberg
mountain.

This brings me back to the point at which I diverged--the Great Fish
River, which takes its rise in the Sneewberg range.

What tremendo