"It must be admitted that the lot of the Chinese labourer does not promise to be very gay or very happy from our point of view" (extract from The Times).
Experience has shown that it is not economical to employ Chinese under the only conditions in which public opinion will allow them to be used, that is, under semi-servile conditions. This was the experience of all other parts of the Empire, but it was the last thing to have any weight with the mine owners. Their one idea of economy was to get labour cheap.
If you deduct 33 to 40 per cent. from the money that has to be paid in wages, that 33 to 40 per cent. is money saved—is money which will go to swell the dividends to an amount, so it had been estimated, of two and a half millions.
The simplicity of this calculation should have given them pause. Financiers, at least, should be aware that nothing is so untrustworthy as the abstract profit and loss account. Men who had used figures to such good advantage should[Pg 47] have understood that while on paper the difference between the price paid to the Chinese and the price paid to the white or black labourer was profit, in actual practice it would prove nothing of the sort.
The mine owners have learnt this lesson by now. They have discovered that Chinese labour is an economical failure.
But in the summer of 1904 they were all eagerness for the coming of the yellow man. To their imaginations these men were to be nothing better than slaves. They were to work as long as they wanted them to work at prices which they would settle themselves. Craftily-concocted laws enabled them to bring the same sort of brutal pressure to bear upon the yellow man as the slave owner of old brought upon the black man. He could be fined, flogged, driven, coerced by all means to tear the gold from the bowels of the earth at whatever rate the masters might wish. They had treated the black men pretty much as they liked. But the black men had the knack of dying in thousands under such treatment (thereby, as I have already noted, affording hearty amusement for gatherings of the Chamber of Mines), or of throwing up their work and going back to their native kraals.
The Rand lord had not had complete control of the black man. Foolish people at home, influenced by what Lord Milner once called Exeter Hall sentiments, had insisted that the black man must possess those personal rights of liberty and freedom which, until recently, were[Pg 48] given to all races who paid allegiance to the Sovereign of the British Dominions beyond the Seas.
For the first time the mine owner was to have forty to fifty thousand men who were to live under strict surveillance in a sort of prison yard, who were to be absolutely at his mercy and at his will, who were to work every day of the week, Sundays included—the evangelizing enterprise of the Rector of St. Mary's, Johannesburg, did not seem to have run to indoctrinating the Rand lords or their slaves with the principles of the Fourth Commandment—who were to be forced into doing whatsoever their masters wished by all sorts of ingenious punishments and penalties.
They of course forgot the all-important factor in this dream of theirs that a Chinaman will willingly consent to an arrangement which, as The Times admitted, would make their lot neither very gay nor very happy.
But none the less this was the spirit in which the Chinaman was recruited in China and first treated on his arrival.
Quite the most frivolous of all the pledges given by Mr. Lyttelton on behalf of the Rand lords, was one in which he solemnly declared that to every Chinese labourer recruited from his native land the Ordinance would be carefully explained by the recruiting officer.
I do not recollect that the House of Commons was moved to an outburst of Olympian mirth at this most ridiculous statement. If I recollect[Pg 49] aright, the statement was received with that solemn British expression of approval, "Hear, hear!"
"The Ordinance," said Mr. Lyttelton, "will be explained carefully to each labourer before he consents to embark for South Africa."
Now, the Ordinance is a long and complicated document. It would be impossible to explain it to the most intelligent Chinaman in under an hour. Actually, it would probably take him a whole day to completely understand the sort of life he was going to lead on the Rand. For one man to explain the Ordinance to 40,000 of them would have taken about nine years. At the recruiting offices established in China for the purpose of obtaining these yellow slaves, it would have taken at least three years to make all the forty to fifty thousand Chinamen still working on the Rand to thoroughly understand the Ordinance.
This was a reductio ad absurdum argument, which one would have thought must have occurred to the minds of the Government, but if it did occur to them they kept it in the background with due solemnity.
Seeing that the recruiting and sending over to South Africa of more than 40,000 Chinamen occupied less than a year, it is clear that this pretence of allowing the Chinaman to enter upon his engagement with the Rand lords with his eyes open was a pretence, and nothing else. But even if the simplest arithmetical calculation failed to convince the Government, their[Pg 50] knowledge of human nature should have made them realize the absurdity of imagining that the recruiting of these men would be carried out on such principles. The recruiter, whether for the Army, or for any other purpose, is very much like a barrister with a brief. He has only to see one side of the argument; he has to close his mind firmly to all considerations other than the fact that it is his duty to get men for the particular purpose for which he is recruiting. Whoever found the recruiting-sergeant telling an embryo Tommy Atkins about the hardships of a life in the Army, of the punishments to which he renders himself liable, of the powers of a court-martial, and the like? He only tells him of the splendid chance he has of serving his King and country; of his handsome uniform; of the influence of that uniform on the female breast, and the like. I have met men who have recruited in South Africa for the Philippines, who have recruited in England for revolutionary committees for some of the South American republics, and I know that the one picture that these men do not paint to their recruits is the picture of their possible hardships. If the white recruiter acts like this to men of his own colour, how was he likely to act towards men of a different colour whom centuries of traditional prejudice led him to regard with contempt and dislike?
I am convinced that ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Chinamen at present working on the Rand neither knew then nor know now the[Pg 51] exact terms on which they were brought from their homes. Again, it is well known that the Chinaman has a hereditary dislike to forfeiting his freedom of action. However bad his Government may be, he has the same instinct for freedom as the white man in Great Britain. All the best authorities on China agree that he would never of his own free-will have consented to bind himself to the Rand lords on the terms set forth in the Ordinance.
What happened, of course, was that the Chinese local authorities, when asked to assist in the recruiting of men for the Rand, made out a list of all the wastrels, semi-criminals and hooligans who kept their Governments in a state of anarchy and unrest, and forced these men to indenture themselves. In fact, the situation on the Rand is very much as if we had emptied our prisons and turned out all our thieves, murderers and hooligans loose on the veld.
One cannot blame the Chinese Government for so acting. It is a proof rather that that ancient empire still retains, amidst a great deal that is bad and corrupt, a spirit of elementary justice.
It would have been criminal to have sent Chinese citizens to the Transvaal. It was quite another matter to send batches of criminals.
The ease with which men were recruited and shipped to the Transvaal seemed to confirm the Rand lords in their delusion that at last they had got hold of people who would increase[Pg 52] their dividends for them without demanding rights and privileges.
The Times had called them masculine machinery. Lord Selborne had said that they would be crammed in loose-boxes and taken over. When at first the long procession of pigtails and blue shirts appeared at Johannesburg they certainly seemed to be so much masculine machinery, so much cattle to be crammed into cattle-trucks at one port and unshipped at another.
But all delusions or illusions were soon destroyed.
It was found that the Chinaman actually thought for himself; that he had a sense of fair play, and that he was not prepared to work like a horse for a shilling or so a day.
The compounds in which these yellow slaves were herded together are pieces of land in close proximity to the mine, surrounded by a high fence, guarded by armed police. They look exactly what in fact they are—prisons, and nothing else. Hospitals have been erected in each of the compounds, and an ample supply of gods have been procured for the Chinamen, possibly as a set-off to the evangelistical zeal of the Rector of St. Mary's, for there is no knowing what a Chinaman might do if he became thoroughly inculcated with the doctrines of love and mercy which were preached in the Sermon on the Mount.
The compound in other respects is very like a village. No one can go into this village[Pg 53] unless he has got some special business or has obtained a permit. These restrictions serve a double purpose. They prevent the possibility of a white man or a white woman being insulted by the slaves, and also put a check upon that inquiry into the treatment of the yellow men which the Rand lords are moving heaven and earth to baulk.
The huts in which labourers live are identical with those made for Kaffirs. They hold one or two, as the case may be.
The labourers have to work day and night in shifts of eight hours. When it is time for a batch of labourers to begin their shift, they are herded together and marched off to the mine, care being taken to keep them quite apart from the Kaffirs and whites.
At the pit mouth they are driven into the cage and dropped down into the bowels of the earth. When the cage is opened the Chinaman is driven out, and if he show some hesitation about leaving the cage, he is kicked out as if he were an animal. At least, that is the treatment to which they were at first subjected. Now, however, their treatment in the mine is hardly so severe. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the Chinaman now does his share of the "kicking." For example, on September 23 last, the Chinese at the Lancaster Mine attempted to murder the skipman by placing a beam in the path of the descending skip—a collision with which, as a writer in the Daily Mail lately pointed out, "would have sent the skip a[Pg 54] drop of a thousand feet." The obstruction was noticed. When the skipman got out he was assaulted, but managed to escape.
The white overseer at first felt that instinctive fear of and dislike for the Chinaman that is peculiar to all Englishmen. He was one man against hundreds. In the majority of cases he had been bitterly opposed to the introduction of Chinese labour. He realized by the restrictions that had been placed by the Ordinance on the Chinamen that they were feared, and, in turn, he feared them himself. It was his duty to see that they worked. It was his duty to make them work. Unable to speak their language, instinctively disliking them, he used the only means of asserting his authority which came to his hands: that was generally a boot or a crowbar. Physical fear is the power by which nearly all primitive communities are ruled. The white races look upon the Chinamen as belonging to a primitive community, forgetting that they are the children of a civilization thousands of years older than any that exists in Europe.
The white man soon dropped trying to rule by force. The Chinaman showed him that he feared blows as little as he feared death. If he didn't want to work he wouldn't work, and showed that fear was not the basis of Chinese morals. Once in the mine the docile, tractable Chinaman of the Rand lords' dream did just as he liked, and continues to do just as he likes.
When he leaves the compound he, perhaps,[Pg 55] takes with him half a loaf of bread. When he feels hungry, he stops work, coils himself upon the ground, and takes his meal. Let the language of the white man be as terrible as he is capable of, let him rain blows upon the Chinaman's back, the Chinaman takes no notice, but continues his meal. When he has finished his bread he rolls a cigarette, and smokes in calm and indifferent quietness. If the Englishman remonstrates with him, John Chinaman replies, "Me get one little shilling. Me do plenttee work for me pay."
And he speaks the truth. He does quite enough work for a shilling a day. There is a wide difference between what he considers sufficient work and what the Rand lords consider sufficient. There is the increase of two and a half millions which the cosmopolitan mine owner hopes to make by using the Chinaman as a slave, and which he never will make either with the Chinaman or the black man. He does his best, however.
The idea that this heathen, whom he has brought over with so much difficulty, in the face of so much opposition, should actually refuse to work like a machine, but should have ideas about the time when he wants to eat, and should even demand a few minutes' quiet smoke after eating, drives him almost to the point of insanity. It is almost as bad as those white workmen, who have a mania for forming trade unions and require fair wages for fair work.
In the face of this Chinese intractableness[Pg 56] while working in the mines, the Rand lords have urged on the white overseers to force the Chinese to do their work. When the overseer points out that if he resorts to violence his life will not be worth a moment's purchase, he is met with the reply that it is his duty to see that the Chinaman does his work, and if he cannot do that they must find somebody else to take his place. Under this threat of dismissal, the overseer has had only one resource. He has had to raise up a race feud, from which he stands apart.
The Kaffirs already hate the yellow man, realizing that they have deprived them of their work. The white overseer has fomented this racial animosity. When the Chinaman has proved recalcitrant and disobedient, when he has refused to do more than a certain quantity of work, the overseer turns the black man on to him to force him once again to his task.
The result is bloodshed and murder of black men and Chinamen.
It is the old problem of leading a horse to the water and trying to make him drink.
The Chinaman has been dragged from his native land in the face of the opposition of the whole Empire to increase the dividend paying. But he won't hurry, he won't work too hard, and in the mine he will do, as I have said, exactly as he pleases. All illusions as to the Chinaman's capacity for hard work have vanished. Even Mr. S. B. Joel—one of the Rand lords—practically admitted as much in his speech at the annual meeting of the Johannesburg[Pg 57] Consolidated Investment Company on November 23. With much reluctance, as may be imagined, the light-hearted "Solly" admitted that "the Chinese had not yet proved quite so suitable for underground work as natives"—but, lest this statement might affect the market price of the shares, the chairman of "Johnnies" expressed the hope that they would attain greater efficiency. No—the Chinaman does not work hard. It is true that he takes his employment seriously, and that what he does he will do well and with a certain efficiency. But he is not the masculine machinery or the cattle of Lord Selborne's imagination. He has enough intelligence to realize that he is the man who is wanted, and acts accordingly. If he works for a shilling a day he will only do a shilling's worth of work. He knows that he must be employed; nobody else can be got to do his job, and he acts, in fact, just as the Rand lords feared the white labourer would act. He won't be bullied into doing any more work than he wants to do. True, he forms no trade unions such as the white men form, but there is among all the Chinese a much more powerful weapon of opposition than the trade unions. Every Chinaman has his secret society, and these societies act together as one man. If the society decides to stop work, they stop work, and neither the fear of death nor the most callous or brutal treatment can move them from their purpose. He hates the white man with the same intensity as the white man hates him. If[Pg 58] he can get the white man into any difficulty he will do so. His ingenuity for creating trouble is worthy of a better cause. With a sort of diabolical foresight he realizes exactly the complaints that will be showered upon the overseer's head by the masters of the mines. If the output falls, he knows that there will be trouble for the white man, so he stops work. He squats down and smokes cigarettes, realizing that by so doing he will be laying up a store of trouble for the overseer.
To show how much the Chinaman is now the master of the situation on the Rand I may quote the following instance—On the night of October 24, the Chinese at the Jumpers Deep Mine refused to work until two of their compatriots, who had been arrested for an infringement of the mining regulations, were released. Every ............