Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/21

18 may be born again; born into the liberty which is not a dream, or a mere Sabbathday hypocrisy, or a Sunday sham, but a continual and ever-increasing passionate joy. This it is which is at the bottom of Imperial unsympathy, induced by the unsympathy of the influential rich, religious highly educated people, who live on the blood and sweat of English people, to whom liberty has ceased to have a meaning, and life has lost its English charm.

A sailor does not hate lawyers; the carnal man does not hate the spiritual man; the imposter does not hate the man of truth and honesty so much as the highly respectable, rich religious people at home hate Australians who secure their independence by working for their living.

What has all this to do with the labour traffic as it is being conducted in Queensland?

Everything.

The Mackay district is adapted to the growth of sugar; if you cultivate sugar you make the garden yield its natural increase. This natural increase is shared by the community to which Mackay belongs. Every ton of sugar which you get out of your garden represents an increase in other gardens. The industries which are called into existence by sugar are as varied as human life. Science and scientific men have thriven more on sugar than on guns and gunpowder. Sugar cannot possibly dispense with science. The machinist and practical engineer, the carpenter, blacksmith, saddler, horsemonger, timber-getter, builder, agriculturist, and other captains and leaders of labour find their highest work when sugar is made most of; the shipper and skipper, the careful banker and the anxious grocer buzz about sugar as bees buzz about flowers; and, like them, make much honey from the cane. If you do not continue to make the most of sugar, you will, in the language of Touchstone, be damned. One of the principal items in making sugar, is labour. The chief labour needed is the labor of the hands and feet. In plain English, the most unlessioned, skillless [sic] of labour, is the labour most suitable for tending the sugar garden. The heat and burden of the day are the hardest to bear of the work required to be done; and those accustomed to bear the sun's heat must do it; the wages must correspond to the value of the labourers' time; and because we do not chop blocks with razors, or sharpen slate pencils with lancets, so we do not employ Scotchmen to dig and dung the sugar garden. As sensible men engaged in the industrial war of the world, you recruit the soldier which is most adapted to your ranks; as loyal officers of the army, you seek to prepare the soldier for the fight in the best way to insure success. In plain English, you believe that the labourer especially adapted for your garden, has been proved to be the Islander of the Islands of the Coral Sea; or better still, the Indian Coolie. In short, any of those races of mankind who can suffer the burden of the solar ray. The reasons why these "aliens" are needed for such work, are so obvious, that I will not insult your understandings by repeating them; while the objections which have been raised against the employment of Indian Coolie labour, are the objections of timid men, ignorant operatives, and politicians for the most part, who could not climb into