John Chinaman on the Rand

by Anonymous

The Chinaman is always a frugal feeder, yet the strength of his passions is notorious. There is no necessity to go back into the past moral history of the Chinese race to contradict this statement.

Gangs of escaped labourers have attacked farm houses on the veld, and where they have found no men, or where the men have been overpowered, they have committed all the most bestial assaults known upon the women and children. One white woman was known to have been found raped, and dead. It is not safe for any decent or respectable white woman to go near a Chinaman. The way he looks at her is sufficient to raise the most murderous thoughts in the mind of any white man present.

A deputation of miners asked Lord Selborne for protection against the Chinamen, stating that the way in which they spoke to and looked at white women was intolerable, and pointed out further that, unless steps were taken to protect the white population, the most horrible crimes would be committed.

That warning has proved true.

Lord Milner has called the sentiment, which has arisen in the breasts of nearly all Britons, of loathing for the introduction of Chinamen into the Rand, Exeter Hall sentiment. It possibly is the sentiment of Exeter Hall, but it is to be hoped it is the sentiment also of all decent people who believe in virtue and morality, and who still cherish a fine chivalrous ideal of woman.

The Government have again and again declared that the protest of the Opposition in the House of Commons was dictated purely by party considerations—that Chinese labour was a good stalking horse. That people really were concerned about the welfare of Chinamen on the Rand they refused to believe. As a matter of fact it is really the Government that are blinded by partisanship; they see everything through a false medium. What they do not see falsely in the Transvaal they do not see at all. For it cannot be that they really are in favour of retaining on the Rand 50,000 Chinamen who commit the most loathsome outrages on the white population. It is almost passing belief that they should blind themselves to the fact that the womenfolk of the Transvaal are absolutely unprovided with any adequate protection against these hordes of Chinamen.

Every day, as has been shown, desertions grow more numerous, and with every Chinaman that escapes the terror increases. No steps have been taken for the protection of his morals. Not even the most human elementary step of letting him bring with him his wife has been taken. And but few steps have been taken to protect the white population. The most ordinary commonplace foresight has been wanting. The carnival of lust and blood now going on in the Transvaal could have been prevented. It was bad enough to introduce Chinese labour at all into the Transvaal. The case becomes more damnable when they are introduced without those restrictions which had been promised.

"I am opposed," said Herbert Spencer, "to the importation of Chinese labour, because if it occurs one of two things must happen. Either the Chinese must mix with the nation, in which case you get a bad hybrid, and yet if they do not mix they must occupy a position of slavery."

The British Government, at the dictation of the Rand lords, attempted to make the Chinaman occupy a position of slavery, failed to completely establish this system, and is allowing the Chinamen to mix with the population. Thus we shall have in the Transvaal the two evils which Herbert Spencer raised his voice against. We have already slavery; we shall certainly have a bad hybrid population. The degrading influence of the Chinaman is shown in Johannesburg. White women are actually marrying them. They are even mixing with the black races. The Transvaal was bad enough before, when merely thronged with the scouring of Europe. But it will be a thousand times worse before the last Chinaman is repatriated.