The Kanaka Labour Traffic.

Manawatu Herald, 26 July 1892, Page 3

The Kanaka Labour Traffic.

Dr J. G. Paton, on the question of regulating Kanaka immigration and labour in Queensland, said :— " The traffic has taken away, some seventy thousand of tha most healthy lads and girls from the New Hebrides, and similar proportions from other groups, nearly half depopulating our Islands. On the sugar plantations, the Polynesians are by law paid 4d per day, if they live to get it, for doing work for which white men would have to be paid from 5s to 8s per day. The poor islanders have no rights in common with white people, and as they do not, or dare not, complain, they serve the planters' purpose beat in all respects. The traffic is a system of deception and cruel oppression throughout.

Another missionary from the New Hebrides says, that veritable flower of the community is carried off, only old and young people being left. If the traffic is not stopped soon, it will come to an inevitable end, for" in twenty o* thirty years the population will be reduced to about one tenth of what it now is. The people of New Hebrides desire to be taken

under British protection. Instead of assenting to this, Great Britain sanctions a shameful wrong, as the islands are being robbed of their population by a system of fraud and compulsion. The Government of Queensland admit the evils of the traffic — " deceit, fraud, and cold-blooded murders "—up to the time the Eoyal Commission sat in 1885, but persist that, since that time, the regulations that have been made have obviated all the evils of slavery.

One argument, however, upsets the inference, viz., that as twentythree languages are spoken by th« natives of the thirty islands of the New Hebrides alone, it is obviously impossible that the thousands of natives who have been recruited from these islands since 1885 could have understood the conditions under which they were recruited (this is the principal " regulation ") seeing that no living indidual understands half those languages.