"With the abolition of flogging, compound managers are now inventing other forms of punishment. In future, also, there will be an extensive system of fines, and food will be withheld.
"Meanwhile, with all these methods of punishment, the coolies are still turbulent. Last Monday practically every boy on the Nourse Deep—seventy-five in all—was sent to gaol for seven days. This step is certain to foment trouble in the near future."
It was this sort of inquisition that Great Britain had set up at the point of her bayonets.
Well might the Australian Government say in their letter of protest—"Australia has been told that the war was a miners' war but not for Chinese miners, a war for the franchise but not for Chinese franchise. The truth, if it had to be told, would have presented a very different aspect, and would have made a very different appeal to Australia."
It would, indeed, have made a very different appeal to the British public. Would there have been so much killing of Kruger with our mouths had we known that a white proletariat would not be wanted—in Lord Milner's words—that the white labourer was not to be allowed into the Transvaal because his trade unions would shackle the enterprise of the Rand lords; that yellow slaves would have to be introduced in the disguise of indentured labour; that these labourers would be whipped and tortured into doing their work? Had they known that on the Witwatersrand the average number of Chinamen flogged daily for one month was forty-two—Sundays included—would there have been so much Rule Britannia and music-hall Jingoism?
It is quite true, of course, that had the British people accepted the principle of importing Chinese labour into the Transvaal it would be quite fair to blame, as Lord Salisbury was always so fond of blaming, the system for the cruelty that inevitably followed. But the British public have never accepted the principle of importing Chinese labourers into the Transvaal. They have always been deliberately opposed to it, as has every part of the British Empire. They are not to blame, therefore, for the state of affairs on the Rand.
As to the insane flogging administered for an offence, it cannot be better described than by giving another quotation from Mr. Boland's letter to the Morning Leader. Here is the method of procedure:—
"A coolie is reported either by a white shift boss or by a head-man for an offence. He is called into the compound manager's office, charged, and given a fair trial (except where the compound manager does not know the Chinese language, and has to trust to his yellow interpreter). Then the sentence is passed by the compound manager—ten, fifteen, or twenty strokes, according to the crime. The coolie, with a Chinese policeman on either side of him, is taken away about ten paces. Then he stops, and at the word of a policeman drops his pantaloons, and falls flat on his face and at full length on the floor. One policeman holds his feet together; another, with both hands pressed firmly on the back of his head, looks after that end of his body. Then the flagellator, with a strip of thick leather on the end of a three-foot wooden handle, lays on the punishment, severely or lightly, as instructed. Should the prisoner struggle after the first few strokes, another policeman plants a foot in the middle of his back until the full dose has been administered.
