INDENTURED LABOUR.

White Ribbon, Volume 25, Issue 293, 18 November 1919, Page 1

INDENTURED LABOUR.

SLAYKKY CAM Oil LAGED

Then run aloft St. George’s Cross, All proudly let it wave, The token proud that undei it There never treads a slave.”

So we used to sing, hut gone aie the days when we could proudly boast that when a man touched Hi it ish soil he ceased to he a slave. At a cost of twenty millions our Empire pur chased the right to free all the slaves in its wide Dominions. Our great sister Republic paid a yet heavier cost, and washed the dark blot of slavery off the bonnie Stars and Stripes in the blood of her bravest and her best. N<»w we are reversing these acts. With 4<>,<xx> coolie slaves in the sugai compounds of Fiji, with the Government of the Dominion affirming the desirability of indentured labour for Samoa, we have become once more a slave-owning Empire, and alas! democratic New Zealand is going to alow Samoa, under our influence, to import Chinese slaves, yrlept coolies, to till its soil. What is indentured labout ? Readers of this journal know what Dr. Andrews, who was sent out to study it in Fiji, reported. Mr Massey said in the House: “Indentured labour may be slavery under some dags, I admit, but it never is slavery in a British country.” We would strongly advise our Premier to study rare fully “Fiji of To-day, M by Rev. Hr. Burton. Dr. Burton is a New Zealander, the son of one of the oldest and most honoured White Rib boners of Masterton, and he »ho r ough!y knows the subject he is writ>ng upon. He tells us that in a few >eai* Fiji will once more be a hcatheo

isle. Fijian Christians arc dying off, and Indian coolies are flooding the islands. Of these he says: “The coolies laugh at our Christianity. They salute our Hag, and spit venomously on the ground the moment our backs are turned.” Dr. Burton tells how, when the sugar companies staitcd in Fiji, the Fijians refused to work in their mills, the land so bountifully supplied their wants that the) had no need to work for wages. Then 40,000 coolies were imported from India, lxrnd slaves, herded in compounds for five years. At first women were not impoited, but the condition of affairs became so unspeakably vile that, to quote Dr. Burton, “The sins that brought down fire on the Cities of the Plains are rampant, and bestiality runs riot.” (fur readers will not have forgotten the terrible condition of affairs as regards the women reported by Dr. Andrews. How every woman sent out became the sex slave of four men, and then Dr. Burton described the coolie compound in Fiji as “the most degrading sight on earth.” The doctor gives instates of brutal punisrments administered, of women and children being flogged.

We were terribly shocked by the Belgian atrocities in the Congo, and thanked God we “were not as other nations,” but many of the Congo hor rors can be paralleled in the mine compounds of South Africa and the sugar plantations of Fiji, both beneath the flag.

The reason for indentured labour is the same old one, to make wealth for the few at the cost of suffering to the m;,ny. The cotton plantations of America, it was affirmed, could not he profitably worked without black labour, and so came slavery and its

attendant evils. To till tin* pockets of the opium growers of India, Great Britain, at the point of the bayonet, forced opium upon China, and the degradation of the opium eater swelled the pockets of the opium grower. Women of New Zealand, are you going to turn a deaf ear to the ap peal of your dark-skinned sisters? Then low wail of misery comes inces

santlv to our ears; they cry to us in the words of Holy Writ, “Thou shall speak for us who are dumb.” bet politicians speak as smoothly as they please about the necessity for production, the fact remains that dark labour is cheap. If g<x>d wages and decent conditions of living were provided, free labour could be obtained, but it would cut down dividends. Shall we allow, in lands under oui control, .men and women to be “tortured to make fat dividends’’ for sugar, rubber, or any other companies ?

Our Government endorsed the prin ciplc of indentured labour for Samoa a few short weeks ago, and already in one Dunedin pa|>cr has appeared a letter asking for coolies to be imported into New Zealand to supply the lack of domestic help. And so the vicious system would grow and spread. What can I do? Every woman can find out how the candidates for her electorate stands on this question, and can make sure that no supporter of indentured labour secures either her vote or any vote that can influence.

Slavery, with vice and immorality attendant upon it, has brought great Empires of the past to ruin, and as patriots we will fight to the last against its re introduction into our own Empire. Our Empire must be good as well as great, and our glori

ous Union Jack float over “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” And only a brave people can remain free. ‘‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

‘lie’s true to God who’s true toman; wherever wrong is done, To the humblest and the weakest, neath the all beholding sun, That wrong is also done to us; and they arc slaves most base, Whose love of right is for themselves, and not for all their race.”