Experience has shown that it is not economical to employ Chinese under the only conditions in which public opinion will allow them to be used, that is, under semi-servile conditions. This was the experience of all other parts of the Empire, but it was the last thing to have any weight with the mine owners. Their one idea of economy was to get labour cheap. If you deduct 33 to 40 per cent. from the money that has to be paid in wages, that 33 to 40 per cent. is money saved--is money which will go to swell the dividends to an amount, so it had been estimated, of two and a half millions. The simplicity of this calculation should have given them pause. Financiers, at least, should be aware that nothing is so untrustworthy as the abstract profit and loss account. Men who had used figures to such good advantage should have understood that while on paper the difference between the price paid to the Chinese and the price paid to the white or black labourer was profit, in actual practice it would prove nothing of the sort. The mine owners have learnt this lesson by now. They have discovered that Chinese labour is an economical failure. But in the summer of 1904 they were all eagerness for the coming of the yellow man. To their imaginations these men were to be nothing better than slaves. They were to work as long as they wanted them to work at prices which they would settle themselves. Craftily-concocted laws enabled them to bring the same sort of brutal pressure to bear upon the yellow man as the slave owner of old brought upon the black man. He could be fined, flogged, driven, coerced by all means to tear the gold from the bowels of the earth at whatever rate the masters might wish. They had treated the black men pretty much as they liked. But the black men had the knack of dying in thousands under such treatment (thereby, as I have already noted, affording hearty amusement for gatherings of the Chamber of Mines), or of throwing up their work and going back to their native kraals. The Rand lord had not had complete control of the black man. Foolish people at home, influenced by what Lord Milner once called Exeter Hall sentiments, had insisted that the black man must possess those personal rights of liberty and freedom which, until recently, were given to all races who paid allegiance to the Sovereign of the British Dominions beyond the Seas. For the first time the mine owner was to have forty to fifty thousand men who were to live under strict surveillance in a sort of prison yard, who were to be absolutely at his mercy and at his will, who were to work every day of the week, Sundays included--the evangelizing enterprise of the Rector of St. Mary's, Johannesburg, did not seem to have run to indoctrinating the Rand lords or their slaves with the principles of the Fourth Commandment--who were to be forced into doing whatsoever their masters wished by all sorts of ingenious punishments and penalties.