The system is as demoralising as it is ruinous.

The owner cannot be ubiquitous: if he is with his working cradle, his servants in the pit steal his most valuable stones and secrete them.

Forty per cent of the diamonds discovered are supposed to be lost in this way."* The proportion of profit between employer and employed seems to have been fairer than usual, though it might, no doubt, have been more regularly arranged.
At Bloemfontein Froude called on President Brand, "a resolute, stubborn-looking man, with a frank, but not over-conciliatory, expression of face." Brand was in no conciliatory mood.

He held that his country had been robbed of land which the British Government renounced in 1854, and only resumed now because diamonds had been discovered on it.

The interview, however, was neither unimportant nor unsatisfactory.