INDENTURED LABOUR.

White Ribbon, Volume 24, Issue 282, 18 December 1918, Page 8

INDENTURED LABOUR.

One half the world does not know how the other half lives.’’ How tiue! We venture to think that viy few New Zealand women can be await 1 of the conditions under wlinh our Indian sisters are living in Fiji. Hie systnti of indentured laboui differs very little from slavery. In many instances Hindu ladies are kidnapped and shioped off to Fiji, compelled to labour on plantations, and live im moral lives. It is actually a Government rcgula tion that three men should be allowed for every woman. One overseer thus explains the system as worked on his estate: “I first separate off the mat lied couples, and tin'll 1 divide the rest of thr women among the men, telling so m.inv men that they must go to this or that woman. If 1 did not do this there would be endless sexual quarrels.” Til** following leaflet was distributed at a meeting held in Allahabad, India, last year, to protest against the svstem of indentured labour: “TO Till*: MOTHERS OF INDIA.” “Mothers! 1 have seen with my own eyes the misery of your sisters in Fiji. They have come to me with tears day after day, in that distant land, and implored help in their sorrow. “They have shown me their own children, living in the midst of squalor and vice. This shame may still continue unabated, and new diildren be born into it, if our voices are not raised against it. “In the name of sa< red motherhood and innocent childhood, and by the memory of your sisters’ tears, uplift to heaven \our supplications, th it this evil may be taken away from God’s earth. “C. F. AN DUFAYS.”