SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1904. INTERFERING NEW ZEALAND. And the Chinese in Africa.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 220, 17 September 1904, Page 6

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1904. INTERFERING NEW ZEALAND. And the Chinese in Africa.

ALTHOUGH Lord Milner, the great pro-Chinese adimrustiator of" South Africa, has said "New Zealand has no right to be poking her long and inquisitive ncse xnto our business , we might as well interfere with her 'notorious' legislation" the "notorious" legislators ot this "interfering colony have done it Some of our "Lords" have asserted that we don't know anything about Africa, and therefore can't say whether the binding of Chinamen in slavery is the correct thing Some "Lords" even go so far as to say that compounded Asiatics, escorted to and from their work, and searched before and after, are not slaves * *■ ■* Of course, they are not They are as free as air They have a compound to roam about m from six o clock at night until five o'clock in the morning, and all the day to imbibe the invigorating ozone of the drives and winzes of the Rand mines Then, they are to be paid Paid, you understand Twelve Chinamen will get nearly as much wages as one white man Surely, everyone will be satisfied ' We in New Zealand don't know anything about it ■f- •* * We don't know, for instance, that the Kaffirs have already shown unmistakable opposition to the Chinamen, and that the Kaffirs will have to be suppressed Therefore, we cannot for a moment understand that the British Government, in accepting the Rand millionaires' large donations to the expenses of the war id return for the Chinamen, will be responsible for the next racial war Not being an Imperial matter, and New Zealand being an independent republic unrelated to the British Empire, it doesn't matter twopence to us whether the country is again steeped in blood or no * *■ * We can understand, however, the truth of the contention of one of the "Lords" that the white working-man in South Africa highly favours Chinese labour , that the more Chinese who get jobs, the better chance of a job for him The "Lord" who replied to the query, "Would it be a good thing if the mines closed down ? " with the word "Certainly 1 " piobably made the most sensible remark during the discussion *•)<■* The whole labour fuss is centred round a few barren and more or less auriferous hills, and the immense tracts of pastoral land m Africa interest nobody Indeed, the country generally is given over to* every kind of avoidable pest besides millionaires The mining centres are congested, and the pastoral industries are at a standstill. It is obvious 1 , therefore, that the British Government threw away tens of thousands of men and hundreds of millions of money to foster an industry that enriches only a very few Continental and British capitalists, and the Chinese labour agents in China ♦ * * The British Government was alleged to have fought for the rights and liberty of its own people, and the aborigines of Africa Seeing that there are millions of blacks in South Africa to be protected, the Government, in its fatherly scheme, merely throws up its hands, says

' The blacks won't work,'" and the world believes it Before the wai thousands of blades worked in Kimbeiley diamond mines, and are still wcikini there There has nevei been any difficulty in getting native labour It is infinitely better labour than Chinese labour, and, if the employment of Chinese gives white men work, surely the employment cf Kaffirs a'so gives them work It isn t fan to say the British Government has bsen outwitted by a gang cf rapacious capitalists It ib only giving the capitalists a "quid pro quo" — Chinese labour for a laige sum -to pay the expenses of a war engineered by the rapacious ones The curious thing is that the Band mines under the Boer regime employed blacks and whites, and paid tremendous dividends, although the Rand ore is low giade There was no talk then of the inability to get labour It is therefore an admission of British weakness to assert that the blacks won't work for the capitalists under the pure clean new administration If the Rand mines, and all the mines of Africa were blown up to-morrow, the millionaires deported, and the huddled population of the mining centres armed with ploughs, and sent out into the veldt, the race hatred, the gieed, the villainy that are now lampant m the Empire's new possessions would die out Africa is, above everything, cursed bv gold and diamonds