They of course forgot the all-important factor in this dream of theirs that a Chinaman will willingly consent to an arrangement which, as _The Times_ admitted, would make their lot neither very gay nor very happy. But none the less this was the spirit in which the Chinaman was recruited in China and first treated on his arrival. Quite the most frivolous of all the pledges given by Mr. Lyttelton on behalf of the Rand lords, was one in which he solemnly declared that to every Chinese labourer recruited from his native land the Ordinance would be carefully explained by the recruiting officer. I do not recollect that the House of Commons was moved to an outburst of Olympian mirth at this most ridiculous statement. If I recollect aright, the statement was received with that solemn British expression of approval, "Hear, hear!" "The Ordinance," said Mr. Lyttelton, "will be explained carefully to each labourer before he consents to embark for South Africa." Now, the Ordinance is a long and complicated document. It would be impossible to explain it to the most intelligent Chinaman in under an hour. Actually, it would probably take him a whole day to completely understand the sort of life he was going to lead on the Rand. For one man to explain the Ordinance to 40,000 of them would have taken about nine years. At the recruiting offices established in China for the purpose of obtaining these yellow slaves, it would have taken at least three years to make all the forty to fifty thousand Chinamen still working on the Rand to thoroughly understand the Ordinance. This was a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument, which one would have thought must have occurred to the minds of the Government, but if it did occur to them they kept it in the background with due solemnity.