China -- Emigration and immigration; Chinese -- South Africa
Insomuch as this new Ordinance once and for all destroys the myth with
which Rand lords endeavoured to surround their slave-owning ideals, I
consider it to be a decided improvement upon the original Ordinance,
with its innumerable pleasures and pretences for the moral and
spiritual welfare of the Chinamen.
That unfortunate and much-deluded man the Colonial Secretary, once
declared in the House of Commons that the Chinaman would have just as
free access to a court of justice as any British subject. He certainly
now-a-days possesses free access to a court, if not to a court of
justice. Access is so easy to it that the court actually follows him
wherever he goes, watches him while he works in the mine, watches him
while he is in the compound, and is ready to punish and fine him, or to
lock him up in the compound prison, without any of those old-fashioned
formalities which, while they may embody the machinery of justice, are
at least guarantees of its purity and disinterestedness.
It would of course be very interesting to know how many of these fines
have ever reached the Colonial Treasury. Armed with such extraordinary
powers as these, it is highly probable that the Rand lords imposed
through their superintendents and inspectors unlimited fines which,
instead of benefiting the Colonial Revenue, merely reduced the wage
bill.
The last clause which I have quoted contains the phrase "organizing a
conspiracy." A conspiracy, of course, is anything in the nature of a
trade union.
I don't say that this new Ordinance was not justified. I think it was
fully justified. No efficiency can be obtained by half measures. The
ablest political trimmers are incapable of serving both God and Mammon.
If God is out of the question, a whole-hearted worship of Mammon is
really better. In short, it would have been far more in the interests
of the Transvaal if the Rand lords had from the first gone the whole
hog and insisted on having Chinese slaves in name as well as in fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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