THE New Zealand Mail. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1892. THE COLOURED LABOUR QUESTION.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1056, 26 May 1892, Page 22

THE New Zealand Mail. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1892. THE COLOURED LABOUR QUESTION.

“ Professor Huxley has calculated that one pint of a near solution of sophistry and self interest will reduce three and a half tons of the bed rock of right and justice to a pasty mass, which can be stirred with a feather.” Thus Mr Napier Bell in a remarkably fine article he has written for the Tci)nctiiiu/i J\Tail on the Queensland Kanaka question, with that uncompromising directness for which he is so well known, and that clearness of well supported statement for which everything that he has written, professionally and otherwise, is remarkable. Mr Bell, like all honest impartial men, has a fierce Radical hatred of the Kanaka labour traffic, with its savage history and false pretences. Slavery of the worst form, of which this traffic is the forerunner, has its roots deep down in the lowest instincts of human nature, which, unlike the brute cieation, has the faculty of hiding ihe play of its predatory instincts under the cloak of sophistical ‘ responsibility. When Columbus discovered the Antilles, he arrived among an Arcadian population of two millions. Promptly enslaved, illtreated, massacred in the name of progress and civilisation, these people vanished in a few years completely. Nothing represents them now but the blackest pagein history, of which the colour of their alien descendants is an eternal reminder. The Aztecs and the Peruvians fell under the same selfish yoke, and were butchered under cover of the same hypocrisy. African slavery followed with all its horrors and its train of apologists. Lastly, the Peruvians and Chilians found out the teeming populations of the Southern Isles, and they oppressed them with a horrible labour traffic —a traffic involving a record of crimes which is almost incredible ; and of this traffic the Australian proved himself the unworthy heir. From the first slave whose bones whitened some nameless gx-ave in the cradle of the human race, after a life of tears in the very dawn of history, to the epoch which Coiumbus began; and from the time of Columbus to our own day, the hideous human traffic has endured. Every age has its distinctive st-in, and one mark is common to all. The common mark of ad is that the ferocious atrocities of each are hidden under pretences of p ogress and civilisation, and sometimes of religion ; the distinctive features of the “ blackbirding ” of our time is tnat its conductors are the most cowardly pitiful scoundrels of the whole record, cf which Mr Bell has drawn such a correct and moving sketch. Like everything else slavery has its political economists. There has been no wrong in histoi'y, there is no wrong now, without its libi’ary of apologists. Happily the human conscience has not y-'t been destroyed by the brutish doctrine of the survival of the fittest, jv. spite of the ravages of that politicoeconomic scourge a vast number of people

has been alarmed and shocked by the determination of Queensland to revive the black-bird criminal era. The Queensland Government with a specious simulation of virtuous indignation denies that the Kanakas are to be slaves, and with Pecksniffian effrontery entrenches itself Ixehind moral maxims and regulations. Sugar pays nowhere under free labour. As Mr Bell points out, Germany and France must have bounties ; the West Indian trade goes to ruin with free labour at e : ghteenpence a day ; nothing but slavery is profitable. “The inference,” writes Mr Bell, “ is, of course, that Providence has decreed that slavery ar.d sugar growing shall be twin sisters, or rather Siamese twins, bound together by the ties of the stomach.” The Kanaka used to get L 6 a year, of which the storekeeper robbed him of onehalf at least, and as the storekeeper and the planter were not kept apart by any’’ Acts against “Trucking,” the wages of the Kanaka at most came to thirteenpence half-penny a week. A labourer kept in the country at 13|d a week, prevented from moving beyond his circle, pi’otected by no Factory’ Acts, carried into the country by something like force to begin his work, and carried out again by’ force at the end, what is he but a slave ? Regulations ! It is useless to talk of regulations in face of the wholesale breach of all the regulations that ever were made. The black-birding regulations were systematically broken, and if the blackbirders were brought to justice, as sometimes happened for the sake of decency—for even this hideous vice paid an occasional homage to virtuethe culprits were invariably let off. The rottenness of public opinion in Queensland is the best guarantee that the fifty-four regulations so pompously introduced to the world by tlie unprincipled Govei’nment of Queensland will be every one carefully broken. The protection of the regulations is about as valuable as the safeguard of the denials. The Kanaka labour traffic is, and cxn never be anything else, but slavery, dooming the islanders to extinction and Queensland to demoralisation unutterable. Admiral Erskine, a man of vast experience and high character, is the last authority who has spoken out uncompromisingly oil the side of right.

The only hope for humanity lies in the Labou r Party in Queensland. The interest of the planters is too strong for justice ; has it not compelled Sir Samuel Griffith to give up to this evil cause the gifts which were meant for mankind ? Appeal has been made to the Imperial authorities to intervene, but in vain. In spite of the support of the best men in the United Kingdom that appeal is failing, simply because the mercenary spirit which rules the Legislature is proof against all arguments but those of the pocket. Six feet of rope for a halter and a chain for a grave ; those are the only terms for honest men to offer to the men who want to go into the black-birding trade. But the Imperial Government behoves in the. regulations, and the hideous business is about to begin again. The only enemy of the trade in Queensland is the Labour Party. The only hope for humanity is in the organisation of the Labour Party. That organisation will one day dominate the situation in Queensland, and then the world will thank Heaven there ever was a Labour Party in Australasia. Mr Napier Bell, we observe, declares that the Labour Party are in this matter actuated not by high considerations, but by selfishness. We need only say that if their selfishness succeeds in saving the islanders from destruction, while improving the status of men and women of the Anglo Saxon race in Queensland, it will prove a sample of that enlightened selfishness, which is the truest reformatory power on the planet.