The white man not only hates the yellow man, but fears him. He knows that at any moment he may be murdered, and with this fear in his heart has resorted to all sorts of brutality.
The Chinamen can be flogged by law for almost any act. The Ordinance says that a Chinaman cannot leave the compound without a permit, and prescribes his life for him on absolute machine-like lines. The amended Ordinance of July 1904 says that he can be flogged in cases of assault with intent to commit any offence. Of course, an assault with intent to commit any offence might consist in hustling his neighbours in an attempt to escape from his compound, in pushing against the white overseer, in refusing to work. In short, the law was so ingeniously amended that the Chinaman could be flogged for anything.
But the law was really not needed. The manager of the Crœsus Mine admitted that when he considered a Chinaman wrong he had flogged him; that it might be against the law to flog him, but he had done so, and would continue to do so.
And he was not only flogged for disobeying the regulations under which—knowingly, it is said—he had indentured himself, but for refusing to work. An Ordinance might substitute corporal punishment for imprisonment in the case of misdemeanours on the part of the Chinaman and so escape the title of slavery; but to force a man to work by corporal punishment is nothing but the essence of slavery. And yet these yellow men have been whipped to their work again and again.
But flogging is no new thing on the Rand, nor is it confined to the Chinaman. The native knows the sjambok of the Rand lord well enough. "I well recollect," says Mr. Douglas Blackburn (lately assistant editor of the defunct Johannesburg Daily Express), writing to The Times on November 4,—"I well recollect seventy-two boys being flogged before breakfast one morning in Krugersdorp gaol for the crime of refusing to work for £2 per month, after being promised £5 by the labour agent."
While these facts are well known in Johannesburg, while there are many people who openly admit that they have thrashed the coolie, or ordered him to be thrashed for refusing to do sufficient work, the Rand papers, which are absolutely under the control of the mine owners, denied again and again that flogging took place. It was only Mr. Lyttelton's announcement that flogging must cease that at last compelled them to admit that flogging had taken place. Mr. Lyttelton had himself denied on several occasions that the Chinaman was flogged, and his command therefore that flogging must cease was quite as amazing to the members of the House of Commons as it was to the Rand lords.
To anybody who has witnessed the development of Chinese slavery on the Rand, it is almost incomprehensible that there should be any people at home who deliberately refuse to believe that the Chinaman has been treated otherwise than as a human being, made in the image of God, with the rights that belong to all men of justice and freedom. The subject is as openly discussed, and regarded as a matter of fact on the Rand, as the Lord Mayor's Show.
I cannot do better than quote from the now famous letters of Mr. Frank C. Boland to the Morning Leader. These letters show the development of yellow slavery in a nutshell, show how from flogging the yellow man to his work the Rand lords finally resorted to torture:—
"At the Nourse Deep severe punishment was meted out. Every boy who did not drill his thirty-six inches per shift was liable to be, and actually was, whipped, unless he were ill, and could show that it was a physical impossibility for him to do a day's work. A sjambok was used; it was laid on relentlessly by Chinese policemen, the part of the body selected being the muscles and tendons at the back of the thighs. Even the sight of blood did not matter. The policeman would go right on to the last stroke. Having been thus punished, the coolie would walk away; but after sitting down for a time the bruised tendons would refuse to work. Many of the coolies were sent to hospital to recover.
"At a later date at this mine strips of rubber were substituted for a sjambok. This rubber, while causing very sharp pain, does not cut.