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Show :HAS ONE JHOUSAND MILLIONS IMMENSE FORTUNE OF SOUTH - ..AFRICAN DIAMOND KING. Son of a Hamburg Merchant Has Made Immense Fortune During , Past Decade. The only man in the world ever re-, re-, puted to be worth 200,000,000 is the Anglicised German, Alfred Beit, whose address, if you care to know, is simply Cape Town, or Kimberley, or Johannes- ! burg, South Africa, or Park Lane, Lon- i don. Mr. Beit is yet on the foolish side of 50, having been born in Hamburg in 1S53, and has made his fabulous fortune in the last twenty-four years. It is all very like a fairy book story to read of a man worth a thousand 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 shops, or wheat cornvrs 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 mer-chant's son in Hamburg, destined to go into the office, where he would leain to check and supervise accounts relating to shipments and receipts of goods to and from the ports of the earth; to inherit a comfortable income from a staid old shipping business; to cultivate a family, a taste for music, a proper regard for beer, and go to his fathers a respected, but very little known German Ger-man merchant. But about the time he ;as going into business and giving up the duels and other delights of students' days, there was a sudden commerce with the young South African town of Kimberley, Kimber-ley, which promised such development that his firm considered, it wise 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 Hamburg Ham-burg merchants. Diamonds, wealth in its most concentrated concen-trated form, had been found in the Orange River country in 1868, and in 1870, or possibly a year earlier, reports came of even greater diamond mines found in Kimberley, to the northwest. There was a rush to the country from all over South Africa, and soon , from all over the world, but it was not until 1875 that the slow-moving, conservative con-servative Hamburg firm of which the elder Beit was .a member felt the tremendous tre-mendous impetus of the new trade strongly, enough to induce them to send out and investigate. That sort of work required the vigor and youth 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 j letters of introduction and a paternal j blPRSine- and sot ail fnr fano Tnii-n I thence by bullock team for the railroad rail-road was not yet built across Cape Colony, the Free State, Transvaal, and so into Kimberley. He found a city of madmen. Thousands Thou-sands had rushed in, taken up or bought land, worked ' the wonderful blue or yellow clay, filled, as is a pudding pud-ding with fruit, with the dull stones which could be cut and polished into the 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 theft; "I. D. B." 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 unfavor-.. ably on the credit of the new district. . He was cool-headed, a man of orderly or-derly business methods by inheritance, inherit-ance, and he saw that there' could very etrsily be too much of a good thing, even diamonds. He undertook then the work of first combining and then . systematizing the diamond mining" industry. This is not to say that Rhodes did not have a large hand in the ultimate close corporation results. He did; but young "Beit was first in' the field, first to realize that diamonds might become be-come so cheap as to be profitless to mine;, first to begin, the quiet buying up of scattered and contlictirg claims; first to see that there was wealth beyond be-yond the dreams of avarice only if the production of diamonds should be Kept down to the point where they would be freely absorbed by the nations na-tions at the old standard price. The result was a combination which is a model of its kind. The great De Beers mine has for years paid per cent . on its bonds and 20 per cent dividends div-idends on its stock, and it is capitalized capital-ized at 8,000,000. Then came the gold discoveries, and the German Beit was the first to soe that vast production was possible only if the mines were worked on the highest scientific principles!, and to accomplish this end he sent for American Amer-ican mining engineers f.nd' paid them what thoy wanted $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 a year 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 aU j ways there was the firm of . Wernher, Beit & Co at work for the greatest profit and the smallest amount of notoriety. no-toriety. ' Now and then young Beit would do something to amaze the trade but not the public as when he had' a pure white 42S-carat finished stone exhibited exhib-ited in a little shop window in. the Rue de la Paix, Paris, as a "sample of our goods." Soon his gold and. diamond mines were paying almost beyond public eorr.-r''tp.ion. eorr.-r''tp.ion. "How much is he worth?" someone asked a friend of his once. "He probably prob-ably could not get out more than a thousand millions now," was the re sponse, but it he would let tne price of ' rough diamonds go below from 2S to 32 shillings per carat no one knows how much he would realize. For no one else except Rhodes knows how many barrels of diamonds they have Falted away down there to keep the market, steady." i |