In their well-known houses of call the popping of champagne corks was like one continuous fusilade, and money flowed like water, for at this time the illicit buyer had little or no fear of a detective tapping him on the shoulder and asking him to account for the diamonds in his pocket.
Professor Darwin may write about the development of species, but if he resided here he might describe how an eminently respectable (?) member of society is evolved from a thief. There are I. D. B.’s and I. D. B.’s, all grades from high to low, from rich to poor, some accounted among the creme de la creme of Kimberley society, even pillars of this or that church, pious receivers and ex-receivers of stolen property well knowing it to be stolen, others buying from hand to mouth to ward off starvation.
The I. D. B. moving in society, probably now the manager of a digging company, or a licensed buyer, but nevertheless a rank hypocrite who has worked his way through all grades of rascality to a certain position, wishes by associating with men of acknowledged social status to avoid suspicion, and therefore, as a matter of tact, he rails against the illicit trade and preaches morality ad nauseam.
If he has money or influence he is surrounded by satellites, who shine but by a borrowed light, or to alter the simile, by dogs who support their miserable existence by licking up the “crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table.”
So powerful is the leaven of corruption engendered by this illicit system, that men, otherwise of undoubted probity, “kowtow” to the man whom in their heart of hearts they know to be, to quote thieves’ Latin, a simple “fence,” because they think that
“Thrift may follow fawning.”
From the passing of ordinance 48 of 1882 until the extension of that ordinance to the entire colony in the session of 1885, Capetown and Port Elizabeth were the head-centres of the I. D. B.’s, who, possessing capital, wished to evade the consequence of their nefarious trade. These scoundrels bought diamonds which were stolen and smuggled from Griqualand West, and men, supposed to be honorable (?) merchants, even members of the legislative assembly, were reported as trading with these characters in diamonds which they must have known to be stolen.
An apparently legal, though in reality a dishonest trade, was carried on by these men, who were described by the editor of the Orange Free State Advertiser as “M. L. A.’s and M. L. C.’s, in league with thieves and receivers of stolen property.”
The Diamond Trade extension act has however been of infinite service in checking the illicit traffic at the Bay and Capetown, though it has not entirely extinguished it.
As a matter of fact, there does not exist anywhere a more unredeemable set of miscreants than the arch-thieves who are at the head of the illicit diamond trade in South Africa.