Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/25

22 all the Christian monarchies until a very recent date. How, with what vengenance [sic] and blood it was abolished in the United States we all know full well. How the Southern States are at the present moment yielding a fuller and nobler increase under their changed conditions than they yielded under the reign of the slavemonger has been made obvious to the meanest capacity. But that we, at this hour and period of the great industrial war, should, on our seeking to found an English colony within the tropics, have got hampered and embarrased on the question of labor, is one of those accidents in your history that cannot possibly assume a permanent influence in any shape or form.

Here have forced upon us two questions which cannot, and ought not to be shirked.

1. What measure of blame is due to you?

2. Was the interference of Government effective?

1 That you have been blameworthy to a large extent is too amply proved by the amount of blame which is due to you still. The death rate among South Sea Islanders on some of your estates has reached the appaling [sic] height of sixty per cent. These deaths all arose from preventible causes. You have shown no ability in acclimatising the Islanders whom you bought, and when through purely climatic effects men and women dropt down dead, and continued to die like rotten sheep, you were supine in the application of remedial measures. It is notoriously true that the Islanders on your plantations have not been properly or appropriately fed. Many have been allowed to die of ulcers, dysentry [sic], fever, wounds, paralysis, delirium, dropsy, opthalmia, pnumonia [sic], and from fear. The number of the "missing" and the "found dead" has not yet been reckoned up; that number you know to be very great. How many have gone mad, you do not know, or care to know. How many have died while watching on your own solitary shores for the ship to come which had been promised to carry them home, you cannot accurately declare; nor are you yet quite sure that you have found out the right way of sustaining, lodging, and clothing these labourers. This is a very serious indictment. But more remains. When on a recent occasion 224 of these people died in a brief space out of some 580, then down with suffering and sorrow, who was present when these Islanders passed away? When anyone was present in those last moments he was generally some brutal person, who could not speak a word of the dying man's tongue, some wretch who was probably not quite sober, or some prentice butcher placed there to do the mere mechanical part of shovelling the remains into a hole.

Let me ask you, not how many hours did you keep these people at work, but, did you ever give them any play? These Islanders are passionately fond of music and dancing; in their own homes or on their own yellow sands, they are nearly always getting up a song, and having a dance. How have you knocked the song out of them, and crippled them for the dance? Had you known how to keep their hearts merry, their limbs had not lost their motion, they had not died.