The mark of the yellow man is upon the Rand. He has set his seal upon the country, and it is to be seen in a hundred things.  
Johannesburg was never an exactly heavenly place. A gold centre attracts all the evil passions of men—draws to it, like the lodestone draws the needle—every species of adventurer and world vagabond.
 
President Kruger knew how to deal with the cosmopolitan hordes that thronged the streets of the "Gold-Reef City." He put a check upon the importation of undesirables, and always remembered before all things that the Transvaal belonged to the Boer people and not to the cosmopolitan. The British Government might well have taken a leaf from his book. But they have failed to do so. Instead of making the interests of the Briton paramount, they have deliberately allowed the Rand to be overrun by every type of Continental adventurer.
 
So Johannesburg, up to the summer of 1904, was never exactly peopled by a moral, law-abiding population.
 
[Pg 99]
 
The fierceness of competition, the keenness to make money rapidly, seems to electrify the sunny atmosphere of the Rand, and to produce a community that knows no law.
 
But since the summer of 1904 the Rand has suffered a change which at one time was thought impossible; it has changed for the worse. To the wild life in the mining city has been added the degrading vices of the Orient. The Chinaman has brought with him all the worst vices of life in a treaty port. Opium dens and gambling hells, in spite of the most careful police surveillance, have sprung up. The yellow man has made his name a terror. He has murdered, raped, robbed, and committed every offence against law and morality. He has literally terrorized—and still terrorizes—the Rand. The plutocrat Jew walks the familiar streets in a state of trepidation; the Boer farmer sleeps with a rifle by his side, and his farm house is surrounded by spring guns and alarums. The life of no white man is safe, and the honour of no white woman.
 
"The Chinese reign of terror continues on the Rand," cabled the Durban correspondent of the Daily Chronicle on November 1. "The latest outrage is that perpetrated by a gang of coolies, who attacked a house at Benoni, injuring its occupant, Mr. Vaughan, and wounding his wife with a razor. They ransacked the house and stole the plate." These are some of the men whose praises were sung by Sir George Farrar at a political meeting at the[Pg 100] Nigel—and whose work as miners, he declared, had proved "a great success." A "great success," perhaps, for the Rand lords, but at what a terrible cost to the community of the Witwatersrand!
 
The South African News of Cape Town has rendered yeoman service to the cause of those who are opposed—and their name is legion!—to the Chinese labour question. The ridiculous contentions of the Rand lords have been exposed again and again by the Cape Town journal, whose fearlessness in grappling with the subject has been in marked contrast to the majority of its contemporaries in the sub-continent, and has earned, as it has deserved, the thanks of the thinking portion of the community. Commenting on October 4 on the continuance of the reign of terror on the Rand, "as it was bound to continue," the South African News puts the case with unmistakable plainness;—"Unless the Chinese are confined in such a way as the mine-owners themselves consider fairly describable as slavery, they are a menace to the public. Probably slavery would mean further outrages; it is clear that torture of various kinds has been allowed on the Rand, and it is far less clear that this is not the real cause of some of the excesses which have shocked South Africa. Either we must have slavery and exasperation, or we must have our people exposed to the danger of murder, outrage and robbery; or we must demand the expulsion of the Chinese, and the turning down[Pg 101] of a disgraceful page in South African and English history which has brought good to no one, and only serves as another indication of the strength to which avarice will lead men in attempting to bend nature into the service of their own greed."
 
It was understood that the only conditions under which Chinese labour could be introduced to the Rand was a system by which they were kept apart, under lock and key, from the rest of the population. But this system has broken down. Hordes of Chinese, as I have shown, are running over the country. The utter futility of the compound system is proved by the fact that as many as thirteen Chinese laundries have been broken up by the police in one week, only for others to take their place.
 
It was recognized by the Government that the Chinaman must not be allowed to be a competitor. This was one of the reasons of herding him with his fellows like cattle in a pen.
 
But the Chinaman broke loose. With Asiatic unconcern he sets all the rules of the Ordinance at defiance, and calmly sets up a laundry in the town, caters for custom, carries on his business just as if he were a free man and not a yellow serf, until some frightened cosmopolitan sees him in the streets, and in a state of fear demands that the nearest policeman shall see whether the creature has a permit or not.
 
John Chinaman, who, of course, has no[Pg 102] permit, is thereupon arrested, his laundry business comes to an abrupt close, and he starts once again his task of gold grubbing for a shilling a day.
 
The amended Ordinance of August last contained this clause—
 
"It is provided that labourers being in possession of gum, opium, extract of opium, poppies, etc., shall be liable to a fine on conviction of ￡20, or in lieu thereof of imprisonment for three months, with or without hard labour."
 
This ominous clause was rendered necessary by the steadily increasing growth of opium dens.
 
Twelve months before, some few weeks after the arrival of the first batch of Chinamen, the Government had passed what was known as the Poison Ordinance. The object of this Ordinance was to regulate the sale of opium. It provided that only registered chemists and druggists might sell opium, and that every package of the drug must be labelled with the word "Poison."
 
Of course, this was ridiculously inadequate, and it was soon found that more stringent measures must be taken. It was decreed, therefore, that opium could only be sold to persons known to the seller, and on an entry being made in the poison-book. These further restrictions were found perfectly futile. The sale of opium increased enormously.
 
At a meeting of the Transvaal Pharmacy Board, the secretary of the board read his[Pg 103] report on the poison-books of the chemists in Johannesburg. It transpired that an examination of the books of one chemist had disclosed the following sales of opium on various dates in July and August last—336 lbs., 18 lbs., 28 lbs., 7 lbs., 31 lbs., 48 lbs. All this had been sold to Chinamen for smoking purposes.
 
One lot was said to have been sold under a medical certificate, but the doctor concerned denied all knowledge of such certificate. The chairman of the board said, that while it was gratifying to know that only three out of sixty-eight pharmacies along the Rand carried on traffic in opium, the ugly fact remained that two of these chemists had imported during August two tons of Persian opium for smoking purposes, and an examination of their books disclosed that only a few pounds were unsold.
 
In vain have the authorities attempted to put an end to this drug habit. Recommendations have been made by the Pharmacy Board that any chemist secretly supplying the Chinese with drugs should be sent to prison, without the option of a fine. As if one evil were producing another evil, it has been proved that not only are the Chinamen demoralizing the Rand, but the Rand is demoralizing the Chinamen. The majority of the Chinese labourers have been drawn from the north of the Celestial Empire, where very little opium is u............