SIR,—In your article last week on the above subject you
charac- terise as "the merest piece of clap-trap" the argument that white men should not work with coloured at unskilled labour. This, and not dividends, appears to me the most important argument bearing on the whole question. Whether rightly or wrongly, the white man is considered superior to the coloured, and only by maintaining that superiority can he continue to govern the millions of blacks in South Africa. If he works at unskilled labour with the coloured man, he will in time become his equal, and the Transvaal will then surely cease to be anything approaching a white man's country. I should like, Sir, to ask if you approve of substituting white labour for the existing black, as to be logical you must. Surely this reduces the argument to an absurdity. The advent of Chinese has resulted in the employment by the mines since May of twelve hundred more white men (Times, October 18th), and these not at low unskilled rates of pay, but at high skilled rates. Neither the Daily Chronicle with its prejudiced articles nor any one else can deny the fact "that the more unskilled coloured labour employed in the Transvaal the more white labour at high wages will be employed."—I am, Sir, &c., ALFRED HICKS. Culverden Castle, Tunbridge Wells.
[There is not the slightest fear that the white man will lose his sense of superiority because he does a kind of labour which is also done by blacks. His sense of racial superiority is far too deeply ingrained to be lost in that way. The talk of the white man working side by side with the black is merely an appeal to prejudice. The white men will, no doubt, work in white gangs, and the black in black, and not in mixed gangs, but the fact that both are working at mining will no more be held to degrade the white than the fact that white workers in the Transvaal are habitually assisted by black workers. This is a kind of working side by side which has always existed without any complaint.—ED. Spectator.]
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
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