Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/5



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The best of us have sinned in the matter on which I presume to address you—namely, that labour traffic of which you seem to have heard so much, and yet know next to nothing. We are all guilty—from the dear bishop down to the humblest of his sheep; from the Premier up to the meanest sugar planter; and from the ablest editor down to his devil. We are all concerned in the stern injustice now rampant in North Queensland, which, if it be not uprooted, will spread to the South. It will spread like thistle seed, and breed like rabbits. That is to say, if the injustice which I propose to lay stark before you be not abolished now, it will become so strong that you will never be able to abolish it.

O! you who love Queensland for its summer sky and sweet air, and hate it for the evil conduct of its affairs and the ways of its public men who are rich and think themselves strong, let us strengthen our hearts by the resolve, that so far as it rests with us, neither bad men nor fools shall rule over us, and where we live injustice shall not reign.

I offer for your thoughtful consideration the revised text of a lecture which I delivered the other day in Mackay. But before turning to the lecture, let me fill your minds with a little colouring matter, so that you may see more vividly what I am driving at in that discourse.

The waters where certain fishers go to fish—not for cod, but for men—are called, in their precise language, "fishing grounds"—a picturesque term, and significant of a traffic which has taken twenty years to grow in Queensland, but has grown during the past five years to surprising dimensions. It has, in fact, grown with your growth, and been made an essential part of your national life. That is to say, if there had been no land handy and appropriate for growing sugar; if there were along the northern coast no organised provision trade; no traders in dry goods—rum, calicoes, tobacco, and many other useful, useless, as well as necessary things, there would not have been any trading in human kind. But it so happened, that some of the men who owned small vessels were able to make contracts with sugar planters to go and fetch and deliver a cargo of human beings on well understood terms; and there were also men, as it