restaurateur no longer reaps a harvest from champagne-
drinking customers, and machinery can be bought for
almost half its cost in London, with the loss of the
heavy transport cost to the Transvaal. But recently
the “ booms ” of Kimberley and Barberton had found a
home in Johannesburg, but now it is merely an abode
of baffled financiers, unemployed promoters, and more
or less ruined shareholders. But Johannesburg will as
surely recover from this depression as the French
Republic shook off the disaster of Sedan, hut it will be
only on the ruins of the gambler’s wreck with which it
is now strewn. The present dreadfully monotonous
appearance of the town will be altered when the numerous
plantations of trees, which are now growing well,
shall have grown more, and perhaps of all towns in the
Transvaal, Johannesburg has the future. Even now, in
1891, improvement has commenced, and, as an acquaintance
told me in Pretoria, “ I can now go to Johannesburg
without all my old friends wanting to borrow
money of me.” Everywhere you are told the same tale
by men with whom the times are now hopelessly out of
joint—“ If I had only realized in time I could have
gone home with a fortune.” One speculator was
pointed out to me who three years back came up from
the Cape to Johannesburg with scarcely five shillings ;
he turned company promoter, and twelve months since
could have realized scrip for at least £80,000 (some said
£120,000). At the time I saw him he was not worth
five pounds. The same thing occurred at the collapse
of the “ boom ” at Barberton. I met a man wfflo had
been a canteen keeper there, and who told me he
opened a small bar and billiard-room in that town when
it was at the height of its pseudo-financial prosperity.
As soon as finished he was offered £2000 for it, then
£75 per month for four years, both of which proposals
he refused. The collapse occurred shortly afterwards,
and he sold the place for scarcely the price of the furniture
and fittings. He sold, as he told me, “ because
there was no one who could afford to come in and take
a drink.”
V iew in the T own of P b e t o b ia .