Germany, like Belgium, differs from France and England in that she has no other colonies from which to draw a labour force. Quite recently her colonists, at their wit’s end for labour, passed a resolution agreeing to import 1000 Indian coolies for labour in the mines. It had not occurred to them that the British India Office might object. How much trouble, to say nothing of expense, they would have saved themselves if only they had asked the office-boy in Downing Street!—they need have gone no higher.

This is another instance of the strange features which now and again attend German colonization, good as well as bad. Their authorities had apparently entirely forgotten the regrettable Wilhelmsthal affair, but probably the real reason was that this incident (which many Englishmen will not readily forget) was regarded by them as altogether too trivial to be noticed. This unfortunate affair—though in some respects comparatively unimportant, yet in reality a grave matter—certainly merits a permanent record in some form, because it is just one of those blundering incidents which bring in their train a whole crop of labour difficulties.

AN ANGLO-GERMAN INCIDENT

A German Railway Construction Company had been allowed to recruit British Kaffir subjects from South Africa. In the autumn of 1910 trouble arose because deductions were made from the labourers’ wages, and they further complained of bad food and housing. The Railway authorities seem to have then embittered the situation by refusing to allow the men food and water. This conduct in a tropical country was little, if at all, short of inhuman, and the labourers naturally struck work and apparently assumed a somewhat threatening attitude. The situation was then handled in a style characteristically German. The Company itself, ignoring the civil authorities, called in the troops, who shot seven of these British subjects in cold blood and wounded several others. How one-sided the whole affair was is demonstrated by the fact that not a single German soldier was even injured. This incident, from every point of view an outrage, was regarded as so trivial that no one appears to have been punished, nor so far as we know has any compensation been paid to the wounded or to the relatives of the murdered Kaffirs.

German colonial knowledge of British public opinion cannot be of a very far-reaching nature when it ignores this incident in asking for British labour to develop its colonies. To Englishmen it cannot be a matter of surprise that the India Office has not yet granted permission to recruit labour from the Indian Empire.

Germany and Belgium are the only two Powers in West Africa which do not possess colonies in other parts of the world from which to recruit labour, hence they are dependent upon other Powers. To the proud German Empire, this situation is irritating, while Great Britain, France, and also Portugal, to a limited extent, can each of them augment the labour force of any given colony by recruiting from their other colonial possessions.

The Portuguese colonies of Angola, San Thomé and Principe, which comprise the major portion of Portuguese West Africa, experience the greatest difficulty in obtaining labour. It is perfectly true that during the last half-century, close on a hundred thousand labourers have left the shores of Angola for the cocoa islands and other places, but these it must be remembered were almost exclusively slaves which had been bought or captured in the remoter regions of Angola, Rhodesia, Barotseland, and, more especially, the Congo Free State. The Portuguese colonists of Angola are so pressed for labour that they started some years ago an “anti-slavery” movement against the Portuguese planters of the islands. No doubt there was an honest element in this movement, but it is equally beyond question that the mainspring of the movement was local anxiety to keep all the slaves in the Angola colony, which is to this moment rotten with slavery. If Angola, a territory more than twice the size of France, were properly developed, it would require first of all a complete abolition of slavery, and then an immense augmentation of the labour supply. When we were at Lobito, the Robert Williams Railway Company and the Electrical Syndicate between them were at their wit’s end for two thousand more men, but these could not be obtained.

The two colonies of San Thomé and Principe are by far the most serious problem. The area of the two islands is not large—only 400 square miles together—but they are extraordinarily fertile; the very air seems to intoxicate with abounding fertility; everything flourishes, cocoa, sisal and rubber; everything multiplies and replenishes on the earth, but man; for some reason there appears to be a curse upon those islands, they are almost without an indigenous population and the wretched slaves imported to fill the ranks die off like flies. The future of the Portuguese cocoa colonies is doubtful because it is obvious that they cannot be run permanently by a temporary solution of the labour question.

THE BRITISH DEMAND

Both France and England at present manage their labour difficulties with greater ease than any of the other Powers, and this because both have a floating supply in their colonies, which, owing to the high standard of colonial development as expressed in railways and steamers, motors and good roads, is readily transferred to the more needy districts. At the same time every now and then we hear laments that expansion is rendered impossible owing to the lack of men.