nstruct railroads but for the hopes attaching to the
mines. This they may do for Zululand and Swaziland also, should the
reefs in those districts prove profitable.

So much for the quartz reefs. As has been observed, the gold mines of
the Witwatersrand differ in the much greater certainty of their yield
and in the much greater quantity of auriferous rock which they have been
ascertained to contain. It is probable that gold of the value of
L700,000,000 remains to be extracted from them. Already a population of
at least 150,000 white men has collected in what was in 1885 a barren
wilderness; already about L15,000,000 of gold per annum is being
extracted. It is practically certain that this production and population
will go on increasing during the next few years, and that the mines will
not be worked out before the middle of next century at earliest. For the
next fifty years, therefore, the Rand district will be the economic and
industrial centre of South Africa and the seat of the largest European
community. What will it be after those fifty or perhaps sixty years,
when the _banket_ beds have been drained of their gold to a depth of
5,000 feet, the greatest at which mining seems to be practicable? It is
possible that the other industries which are rising as ancillary to
mining may for a while and to a reduced extent hold their ground.
Probably, however, they will wither up and vanish. The land will remain,
but the land of this highest part of the Transvaal, though fit for
pasture, does not lend itself to tillage. The probabilities, therefore,
are that the fate of Nevada will in time descend upon the
Witwatersrand--that the houses that are now springing up will be
suffered to fall to ruin, that the mouths of the shafts will in time be
covered by thorny shrublets, and that soon after A.D. 2000 has been
reached this busy hive of industry and noisy market-place of
speculation will have again become the stony solitude which it was in
1880. For all practical purposes, however, an event a hundred years away
is too distant to be worth regarding. The world will in A.D. 2000 be so
different from what it is now that the exhaustion of the Rand gold-field
may have a different bearing from any which we can now foresee.
Johannesburgers themselves are not disquieted by thoughts of a future
that is even half a century distant. The older sort will not live to see
it, and the younger sort expect to have made their fortunes long before
it a