THE CURSE OF GOLD.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16558, 23 May 1914, Page 10

THE CURSE OF GOLD.

Year by year South Africa is learning the full meaning of tho phrase “the curse of gold.” Since 1886 the blight has been upon the country. President lvruger kept the oosmopolitaai capitalists fairly well in hand, having sufficient shrewd common-sense to realise that many of them would stop at no means, however outrageous, to gratify their lust for gold. What was patriotism, what was the Transvaal, what was South Africa to them? Nothing. Had gold novel - been found on the YVitwatersrand, the Transvaal today would have been in the main a country of peaceful, placid-living pastoralists. Had there been no gold there would have been no mine magnates and there would have been no South African war. Millions of money were expended and thousands of lives were sacrificed for no better purpose than to place a Boer Government in power, not only in tho republics but also in two British colonies, and to give the mino magnates something like a free hand on the Rand. These truths have become so familiar that their recital seems little moi‘e than tho repetition of the merest platitudes. But unfortunately the blight seems to be rapidly extending. Everyone knows that the first action of the mineowners on finding themselves reinstated on the Rand was to flood the Transvaal with Chinese coolies, who, the magnanimous magnates had discovered, were prepared to work for lower wages than even the rawest, most uncivilised natives of the country would accept. Chinese labour wa-s, of course, immeasurably cheaper than that of tho whites —of the men who had helped to win back to the magnates their much imperilled mines—and Ihe fact that tho Chinese hordes brought "with them into British territory habits that could not be described in any civilised country did not trouble the great lords of the Rand. Ultimately a commission investigated tho mode of life led by those Orientals within the compounds and its report was of such a character that they were cleared out like some foul plague.

Then, yielding to the force of public opinion, the mine magnates engaged Surgeon-General W. C. Gorgas and several of his assistants to investigate the causes of the high death-rate among the natives they were employing. General Gorgas, it will bo remembered, was the famous chief sanitary officer of the Isthmian Canal Commission at Panama, which body succeeded in rendering safe and even healthy the low-lying, fever-haunted regions crossed by the great waterway. For years the magnates had advanced the plea that the abnormal death-rate was due entirely to the natives’ own carelessness and ignorance. Before and after 1903 the rate among the natives employed in the mines was no less than 71.7 per thousand. In 1912 it had been reduced to 26.84 per thousand and even this General Gorgas states in a report he has just issued is “very much too high.” The death-rate among miners in New Zealand during the same year was 8.87 per thousand, or nearly three times less than the rate on the Rand where the victims were all men m the very prime of life. General Gorgas attributes the appalling mortality in the South African mines to threo primary causes overcrowding in the compounds, faulty hospital system and insufficient care of the sick, and insufficient sanitation of the mines and of the compounds. The deaths of the native workmen, therefore, wero not duo to their own carelessness and ignorance, but to the heartless greed and inhuman negligenco of the mine-owners. But not yet aro the rapacious magnates satisfied. They want cheaper labour and still cheaper labour. "White workmen cannot be lodged in compounds, paid from 10s to 20s a week and fed on maize. But blacks from tho kraals can. The Chamber of Mines has been publishing mendacious fore-

casts to show that “ the life of the mines” is extremely precarious and that to save tho mining industry working expenses must be reduced. Such is the position to-day. If the magnates get their ■ way before long the gold mines of the Rami will be worked almost entirely by blacks. Already the process of weeding out tho whites is in active progress.