Gliding gently over the dreaded bar, and landing at daybreak, I made my way to the Royal Hotel, and after breakfast sallied forth to see what changes a decade had wrought. At every step I was agreeably surprised at the improvements which I saw. Streets, which ten years before were knee-deep in sand, I now found hardened, the town council having spent £40,000 merely in re-forming a few miles of the Musgrave Road leading to the Berea; trams hourly running, where in my time horses could barely walk. New buildings and fresh stores, a magnificent theatre, and a new town hall showing the progress of the place. All, however, were not satisfied. One old colonist I met frankly said, “Don’t be deceived, Doctor, there is no reality in what you see, all imperial money, another Zulu war would suit us just now.” I could not help thinking whether the signs I saw were the evidence of real progress or mere ephemeral prosperity, and I asked myself the question, “Has sugar, has coffee, has the Overberg trade done all this?” I knew that two recent and eminent visitors had taken a harsh view of Natal and Natalians, having formed but hurried opinions of the situation.
Froude and Archibald Forbes no doubt thought themselves competent to judge, but the one was just as far wrong, and acted as unfairly to the body of Natal colonists, when he said: “Many of these are no better than the mean whites in the Southern States of the Union,” as the other when he wrote that the leading attributes of Natal colonists are “untruthfulness, insobriety and swagger.” With due deference to Mr. Froude, I distinctly say from years of observation, there is no section in Natal low enough to be compared with the mean white of the Southern States, whom even the darkies themselves despise.
The mistake which both Froude and Forbes made was one which a well-known writer has described as the great error of the nineteenth century, viz, hasty generalization.
Resting a night I took train to Verulam, Victoria County, my old seat of practice. This line of rail was all new to me, having been laid since I left, though it ran through sugar and coffee plantations which I knew well. On arriving at Verulam I procured a horse and rode off to visit the various estates in the neighborhood: Redcliffe, the Grange, Ottawa, Hammonds, Waterloo, Trenance, Southburn, Sunderland, and others whose names have escaped my recollection, and their hospitable owners I saw again. Many of the estates, however, I found had been taken up by Mauritians, and the vacuum pan sugar boilers, as well as the field overseers, had mostly come from that island, in fact old residents told me that in the trains running to and from D’Urban there was now almost continually a complete babel of French, English, Hindustani and Kafir. I must say that I was disappointed with the general appearance of the coast. Coffee enterprise seemed dying out fast, no planting going on, the trees suffering from an insect, the “borer,” and from the leaf disease (Hemiteia Vastratrix), which has played such havoc in Ceylon. The extent of land under sugar had increased, but drought, low prices, and the competition of beet-root were making the planters look serious.
Another phase of affairs which struck me as assuming unmanageable proportions was the keen competition of the cheap-living Asiatic, who in the cultivation of small holdings could almost beat the European out of the field. When I saw these men, these crofters, themselves working their patches of ground, I was at once let into the secret of their success.
White men in Natal, as a rule, think manual labor in the fields derogatory. The only exception to this of which I ever knew was a settlement of Germans near D’Urban. From the feeling generally abroad I can easily understand the unpalatableness of Froude’s remarks when he wrote: “Here and there a farmer makes a fortune, but generally the whites will not work because they expect the blacks to work for them. The blacks will not work because they prefer to be idle, and so no one works at all.” After all there is a considerable stratum of truth running through this statement.
To return to the coolie question, Indians seem very loath to leave Natal. I find in the last Natal Blue Book that out of 33,343, comprising men of all castes landed from India since immigration began in 1860, only 2,141 have returned, the total number of Indians in the colony in 1884 being 27,276, of whom 17,241 were males and 10,035 females.
Gen. Sir J. J. Bissett, in an address to the electors of Alfred and Alexandra counties in June, 1884, recognizing the importance of this point, said: “With regard to coolies, I consider that they are introduced for a specific purpose, they should at the expiration of their term of indenture be required to return to India, subject to a maximum extension of term (say) to fifteen years in all. I consider that any benefit derived from them by a section of the community is very greatly counterbalanced by the injury their presence causes the colony, both directly and indirectly. I am also opposed to coolies holding land in this colony.”
In my opinion Sir J. J. Bissett’s views display a lamentable ignorance of the first principles of political economy, and are suitable to a timid mercantile community only, afraid of the further cheapening of articles of consumption. A great proportion of the Indians, both in the West Indies and in Natal, as soon as they have served their time and are free from their indentures, become in every sense thorough colonists; they buy property, invest their savings, “marry and are given in marriage,” and show no desire, as statistics prove, to return to India—differing entirely from the Chinese, whose sole object is to return home as soon as possible with every sixpence they can drain out of the country in which they have been living. To my mind the turning away of thrifty bread winners from a country sparsely populated by an infinitesimal working class of whites is the height of absurdity. There is not even the excuse on the ground of morality which the Americans have against the Chinese in California. Moreover, how would Sir J. J. Bissett treat the question of the increase in their population? Would the children born in Natal be allowed to remain there or not? Would he have the Indians under British rule treated in the same manner as the Dutch have since treated them in the Transvaal State, where, certainly without the “liberty, equality and fraternity” popularly supposed to pertain to republican ideas, they passed a law through the Volksraad, which was promulgated on June 10th, 1885, disqualifying “Coolies, Arabs, Malays and other Asiatics” from obtaining the right of citizenship, or from possessing landed property, and compelling them further, under penalty, not only to register themselves, and pay £25 for so doing, but also giving the government power to place them in locations;[[66]] or would he have them treated as they are in the other Dutch republic (the Free State), where it is contrary to law to let fixed property to Arabs, and where they cannot even procure a license to trade.
No! Thank God such outrages cannot be committed under the British flag! In Natal less false pride, greater economy and industry are all the requisites necessary to produce a competition vigorous enough to stem the tide of Asiatic intrusion. There is one fact, however, which Natal colonists have seriously to face which is that to every white man there are at least thirteen Kafirs and one Indian.