Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/18

15 this spiritual and moral discovery, and that the discovery gives you a passionate delight and satisfaction; you will have brought in a new industrial era, you will have solved the mystery of social life and give an absolutely intelligible reason for the continuity of human endeavour.

Now, the reason, I think, why the Imperial Government has been so ready to flout and lecture Queensland on its labour traffic, is simply because it obeys in this matter the behests of the highly respectable religious educated people in London, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, and the agricultural districts, whose personal interest it is to keep up an intermittent racket on slavery and the labour traffic. The reason why high officials have written so wantonly against Queensland sugar planters is, that those officials found a vast number of highly respectable religious educated people ready to believe all that may be said of murders, outrages, and slavery, as they have been said to obtain in Queensland. The reason why highly respectable religious educated people in England keep up a constant, or intermittent row, as it suits them, on these matters of slavery and outrages on humanity, is a twofold reason.

1. They are slave-drivers of a deep indellible [sic] dye, and commit outrages on humanity that are systematic, which yield the highest pecuniary profit and procure the greatest national disgrace.

2. They go to the enormous expense of indulging in the luxury of maintaining two religions, each of which contradicts the other. For six days in the week they do nothing but take thought for the morrow, buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, fare sumptuously every day, pick quarrels and jealousies, and foster competition with neighbours; make the longest, heaviest, and most precise weapons of war; gender, mistrust, spread calumnies, and indulge in revenge; and keep up an army and navy on the blood and sweat of peaceable people—a people whose life is robbed of all joy and passionate delight in that which most distinguishes man—a people whose unremitting toil is unrelieved by any hope—to whom freedom, therefore, has no meaning, and "carefulness has been discouraged by continually showing to the careful that those who are careless did as well as themselves—sometimes better." Nay, a people who have paid penalties for carefulness. Labourers working hard and paying their way, have constantly found themselves called on to help in supporting the idle, the dissolute, and depraved; have had their tables, chairs, beds, fire-irons, clocks, and family Bibles seized under distress warrants, that able-bodied paupers might be fed, and eventually have found themselves and their children reduced to the deep damnation of pauperism. "Well-conducted poor women, supporting themselves without aid or encouragement, have seen the ill-conducted receiving parish pay for their illegitimate offspring. Nay, to such extremes has the process gone, that women with many illegitimate children, getting from the rates a weekly sum for each, have been chosen as wives by men who wanted the sums thus derived." In short, you shall put one leg of a pair of compasses in the heart of England, and with the other describe a circle of thirty miles in which you shall find eighty thousand English men, women, and children idle, and