Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 4, 28 January 1904, Page 18

Notes

He was an 'Imperial' A poet of the Kipling order said of a noted marksman in the Anglo-Boer war : ' Its 'ell and broken bottles w'en 'c shoots.' Some shootings of quite a different style was done in London lately. An unknown, man entered the Bank of England and fired four shots across a table at the secretary— happily missing him every time. The London correspondent of the ' Freeman,' in writing of the attack, remarked : ' Possibly it will turr out that the assailant was an Imperial Yeoman.' And so, in fact, it did turn out ! The exploits of the ' Imperials ' in South Africa have given our returned contingenters many a droll tale to tell by the inglenook. It appears that most of those wariiors bold could neither keep astride a cantering steed nor hit the broadside of a barn at a hundred yards with a rifle bullet. Like Bill Barber in ' Eben Ilolden,' nothing was safe in South Africa but the things they shot at. Alas, for the Uitlander ! Some weeks ago, during an election contest, the walls of Dulwich (tEngland) were decorated with glaring posters which smote the Tory candidate in the following terms : ' WANTED : 200,000 Chinese Laborers for the Transvaal Gold Mines. Wages 2Jd per day. . -. The mineowners regret that they are compelled to issue this no-

tice, but they are obliged to do so owing to the fact that British workmen want the franchise, and in many cases belong to trade unions ; they also refuse to live on rice. . . No Englishmen need apply.' * The poster was, of course, poison to the local Tory party. The worst of it was, that it summarised the position in the Transvaal with the same measures of substantial accuracy as might be achieved by the political cartoons of Linley Sambourne or Sir Francis Burnand. Nobody nowadays pretends to believe that the Anglo-Boer war was fought to secure ' equal rights for all white men in South Africa.' That shibboleth served its turn at the time. But the mine-owners, who engineered the war, want no white men in their South Africa now. For white men have a weakness for living humanly. And this requires higher wages than is paid to the yellow barbarian and the semi-savage Kaffir who are satisfied to live ori rice and mealies and to pig together in closed compounds like hogs in a sty. Thei obocts of the mining nabobs seemed plain to person's of average brain-weight long before a Boer put a cartridge in his Mauser or looked along its barrel at a redcoat. Earl ,Grey, moreover, let the cat neatly out of the bag before the war had been two months in progress. It was a meeting of the South African Company iri London. He openly told his fellow mineowners that the conquest of the Transvaal would remove once and for all the restrictions which the Boer Government had placed upon the employment of the black-skinned natives, would give an unlimited command of cheap colored labor, and would thus enormously increase the already enormous profits of the shareholders. • And so it came to pass. The millionaires began the new South African millennium by cutting down the paltry wages of the Kaffirs from 3s 6d to 2s 6d. The black serfs resented this. Numbers of them stayed sullenly in their kraals and refused to go to the white man's pig sties as in the days before the war. Was this abstention of the black man intended and planned by the mining magnates that made the war ? Who knows ? At any rate, the obstreperous Kaffir came not so numerously as before to delve and haul for the mining man. The cry arose :' A dearth of cheap labor! Our great mining industry, the Transvaal's sole salvation in danger ! ' It was known that the heathen Chinee is cheaper than the Kaffir. So the -new Land of Promise is to be filled with swarms of yellow pagans from the Far East. And all the time that the lamentation of the desolate millionaires whined and whimpered through the land, between a thousand and two thousand half-starving white workers were walking ithrough the streets of Johannesburg, teasing their fierce hunger with the slop-soup of charity kitchens. Yet not one solid climatic or economical reason has to this day been advanced to show that white men could not work the mines of the Rand as profitably as their fellows have worked those of Australia and , New Zealand- But to the nabobs of the Rand—mostly with German names— the worker is merely a wheel or a lever or a crank in a big money-making machine. They are no more concerned in protecting 'British interests 'in the Transvaal than by the canals of the planet Mars. They are after fat dividends. To this they are willing to subordinate everything. The employment of white men would mean diminished — though still heavy— dividends. So the Caucasian must go. And the white man's El Dorado that the war was to have produced in the Transvaal goldfields is to become a reserve of black and yellow pagans*, the bondmen of a parcel of plutocrats with hooked noses and German names. And for this Australians and New Zealanders bled and died. For this they split their vocal chords in the patriotic chorus : ' Our last man and our last shilling for South Africa ! ' When Australasians protested against the supposed woes of the ' pore Uitlander ' under ' the regime of Oom Paul, they were patted on the back by British

statesmen and South African Jingoes for their sturdy patriotism. How times are changed ! Now Mr. Seddon and others raise their voices in mild and gentle remonstrance against the thousand-fold worse disabilities inflicted on Uitlanders by the gang of millionaire mineowners that now rule the Transvaal. And Mr. Seddon and the rest are curtly told, in effect, that they 'are impertinent meddlers and busybodies.