THURSDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1905. PASSING OF THE YELLOW SERF

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 52, 28 December 1905, Page 17

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1905. PASSING OF THE YELLOW SERF

VERY political quack has his panacea. And ~ c jjjQpl some of them profess a belief in the omniii m* P°^ cncc °* their nostrums as firm as did Waltho Van Clultcrbank in his Balsam of SffihWffl Balsams, two drops of which w«re warcJ^llg! ranted to restore knocked-out brains and ?* *a^t reseat decapitated heads. Lord MUner was one of the knot of political Van Clutterbanks who invented and prescribed the Yellow Balsam of Balsams— to wit, Chinese serf-labor— as the Grand

Palladium of South~~Africa. on the Rand wanted, to fpb nxOren^illipns..,, T;he> cheaper the labor the bigger the profits. British 1 \vorkers— for whose comfort the war was once fabled to have been fought*-- were so fastidious as to wish to live like mii|an beings, as they -had lived in the days of. Oom Paul. For this impertinence they were left, after the A war, to starve like ownerless dogs in the streets of Johannesburg. Eve« black labor' was too- deaV* for "the ,#jbf the millionaires. And so • Chinese cheap labor ' was struck upon as a sure means of turning the Transvaal into a money-making paradise tor the hard-fisted monopolists who had taken special care not to expose their precious skins within range of the Boer Mausers, when the war was dragging its slow length along. And for these selfish capitalists New Zealand sacrificed so many useful lives, the British and Irish taxpayer spent £290,000,000 in good minted gold, without counting the Empire's loss in money, blood, and prestige. The feeling has long been widespread throughout the Empire that this was too high a price to pay for the privilege of chasing great numbers of white Christian workers out of the Rand _and replacing them with pagan bondmen from the slums o! Canton and Shanghai —all in the interests; of a knot of magnates of the Stock Exchange. This sordid ending of a squalid war has given rise to many a biting political lampoon. Hereunder is one which will bear reprinting at the present juncture. It was used with good effect some eighteen months ago to harrow up tl# soul and dash the hopes of a Tory candidate for an English constituency : ' There is a happy Rand, _ Par, far away ; Where impoverished randlords pay ONE " bob " a day. There Chin-Chins toil all day, And, toiling, sadly say : " Chinee man likee be Far, far away." 1 Once on that golden RandHe can't get away ; His not to question whyj But to obey. Barbed wire surroundeth him, And police, with faces grim, Staves in hand, they slowly sine : " Toil, toil all day." ' There was a happy land NOT far away ; Britain we called that land, Not far away. But if Joey has his way, And we allow his sway, PIGTAILS will soon be seen NOT far away.' * But the passing of the yellow serf is now at hand. Ex-Prime Minister Mr. Balfour saw the shadow cast by coming events when he issued his recent dramatic appeal to the Liberal woodman (Mr. Campbell-Bannerman), to ' spare that tree '—to leave the polyglot plutocrats of the Rand" in peaceful possession of their present and prospective slant-eyed chattels. It Avould (he pleaded) be « a great and criminal blunder ' to slop the importation of indented yellow serfs from the Distant East. But its extinction has been happily decreed. If the Liberal party return to power, pigtails will in due course be far, far away from the Rand— deported, bag and baggage, to the place from which they came. The curtain will then be rung down on one of the most discreditable results of the late war. And then, perhaps, the white worker— for whom the millionaires shed such a wealth of mock-turtle tears when the war wasbrewing—may be afforded as good a chance of making a living in the. Transvaal mines as they had under the patriarchal rule of Oom Paul Kruger^