JOHANNESBURG.

Grey River Argus, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 6767, 24 May 1890, Page 4

JOHANNESBURG.

The latest Cape paper reports the complete collapse of the Johannesburg bubble. The alleged gold-field, from which bo much was expected and towards which bo many reatleas adventurers were allured, not merely from all parts of South Africa, bnt from these colonies, by expectations whljjh had no solid basis of fact, la declared to be a delusion and a snare. People are flocking back to Durban, Port Elizabeth, •nd Cape Town. Two comedy companies and an opera troupe at Johannesburg are desoribed as being in txtremis and the local newspaper offioa are preparing to put up their shatters. From start to finish, we are told, the supposed Dorado has been fraud and a sham. Warnings, however, ware disregarded, and remonstrances were •ooked upon as prompted by timidity or Ignorance or by a spirit of perverse opposition to courageoua enterprise. The wilful would insist on having their own way, and numbers of men, and women top, have sunk the whole of their savings in undertakings doomed to failure, bus which were embarked in on the supposition that large deposits of gold were about to be unearthed at Johannesburg. It has, unfortunately to be added oh the authority of the Cape Times of the 20th of March that "with the wreck of that place comes % period of depression for the whole of South Africa." The miners, presumably, have been living on the credit afforded to them by the local storekeepers, who .in their turn have been dependent for their ■uppließ on the merchants and importers in the seaport towns and on the farmers Slid glaziers In the country ; and upon these will fall the cost of maintaining a large population in unproductive employments for a period of something like two yean. We have had some experience of this sort of thing in Victoria, when people rushed away to Port Curtis and again to totheSaowy River, only to return impoverished and disappointed. The lesson which such incidents should convey to the sanguine and the credulous 1b too obvious to be insisted upon, bat is it almost hoping •gainst hope to anticipate that this fiasco will operate m • warning against similar lawns rush«s forth* time to come.— The ▲Utttlttlfttt.