THE RICHEST MAN IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2391, 28 December 1899, Page 59

THE RICHEST MAN IN SOUTH AFRICA.

THE STORY OF HOW HE MADE HI9

The only man in the world ever reputed - to be worth £200,000,000 is the Anglicised German, Alfred Beit, whose address, if you care to know, is simply Capetown, or Kimberley, or Johannesberg, South Africa, or Park lane, London. Mr Beit is yefc on the right side of 50, having been born in Hamburg in 1853, and has made his fabulous fortune in the last 24 years. It is all very like a fairy book story to read of a man worth 200 millions, but it seems like a Christmas spectacle to read that what has made him so rich is not , land or railroads or ■ factories or Bhops, or _ wheat corners or oil fields, but just gold . and diamonds.

The very things that stand for riches came to him in the first instance, not as a result of riches, but their cause. Alfred Beit was a well-educated merchant's son in Hamburg, destined to go into the office, where he would learn to check and supervise accounts relating to shipments and re-, eeipts of goods to and from the ports of the earth ; to inherit a comfortable income from a staid old shipping business ; to cula (

tivate a family, a taste in music, a proper regard for beer, and go to his fathers a r&spected but very little-known German merchant.

■ But about the time he was going into and giving up the duels and other .delights of student days, there was a sudden 'commerce with the young South African town of Kimberley which promised such 'development that his firm considered it jwise to send a representative into this new marvel land to examine and see if the resources of the country justified the big credits the traders in all sorts of stores

and machinery were demanding from Ham-

burg merchants. '. Diamonds, wealth in its most concentrated form, had been found in the Orange River country in 1867, and in 1870, or possibly a year earlier, reports came of even greater diamond mines found in Kimberley to the north-west. ' * There was a rush to the country from all over South Africa, and soon from all over the world, but it was not xintil 1875 that the slow-moving, conservative Hamburg firm of "which the elder Beit was a member

felt the tremendous impetus of the new v trade strongly enough to induce them to Bend out and investigate. That sort of work required the vigour and health and activity and, perhaps, the ' enthusiasm of a youngster, and so Alfred Beit, then 22 years of age, was outfitted •with credit, with arms, with letters of introduction, with careful instruction and a paternal blessing, and set sail for Capetown, then by bullock team — for the railroad was not yet built — across Cape Colony into Kimberley He found a city of madmen. Thousands had rushed in, taken up or bought land, worked the wonderful blue or yellow clay filled, as is a pudding with fruit, with the dull stones which could be cut and polished into jewels for which the world would give fortunes. "There was chaos in the laws, chaos in the manner of working mines, chaos in the trade which competition had already nearly ruined ; there were enormous losses from thefts; the "1.D.8." business — illicit diamond buying — had grown to scandalous proportions, and altogether the young German saw a state of affairs which, if not

remedied, would compel him to report unfavourably on the credit of the new districts.

He was cool-headed, a man of orderly business methods by inheritance, and he saw .that there could very easily bs too much of a good thing, even in diamonds. ! . He undertook then a work which is usu- > ally attributed wholly to Cecil Rhodes, who aid not go into the district until some years 'afterwards the work of first combining and j,then systematising the diamond mining industry. • t This is not to say that Rhodes did not •Ihave a large hand in the ultimate close'corporation result. He did ; but young 'Beit was first in the field ; first to realise .that diamonds might become so cheap as to profitless to mine ; first to begin the .quiet buying-up of scattered and conflicting claims ; first- to see that there was (•wealth beyond the dreams of avarice if the production of diamonds should be fcept down to the pomt where they would toe. freely absorbed by the nations at the pld standard pric*. "< '• The result was a combination, which was » model, of its kind. The great De Beers >nine has for years past paid 5£ per cent, on its bonds, and 20 per cent, dividends on JLts stock, and it is capitalised at £8,000,000. flhen came the gold discoveries, and the .German Beit was the first to see that vast production was possible only if the mines .trere worked on the highest scientific principles, and to accomplish that end he sent for mining engineers and paid them what they wanted in salaries.

Rhodes, dashing, sensational, came along and became the chief figure in the public eye when that eye was turned towards South Africa ; but always there wa3 the 6rm of Wernher, Beit, & Co. at work for the greatest profit and the smallest amount of notoriety. Now and then young Beit would do something to amaze the trade — but not the public — as when he had a pure white 428^ carat rough diamond cut to a 228£ carat finished stone and exhibited in a little shop window in the Rue la Paix, Paris, as a "sample of our goods." Soon his gold and diamond mines were paying almost beyond public computation. "How much is he worth?" someone asked a friend of his once. "He probably could not get out more than 200 millions now," was the response, " but if he would let the price of rough diamonds go below from 28s to 30s per carat, no one knows ,jhow much he would realise. For no one else except Rhodes knows how many barrels of diamonds they have salted away down there to keep the market steady." — London Herald.