Major Seely, the Conservative Member for the Isle of Wight
who served with distinction in the war, has a strong letter on the Chinese labour question in the Times of Tuesday. The importation of these "yellow slaves," Major Seely insists, will shatter the ideals of every soldier who fought in South Africa. If the most tangible result of all our efforts is the im- portation of labourers forced to work with every circumstance of ignominy in strict seclusion and under conditions and re- strictions reducing them to the level of slaves, the war will seem to have been waged in vain. For Britain to sanction the arbi- trary introduction of this system for the sake of immediate gain—the gold will not disappear even if it takes more years to extract it—before representative government had been given to the people of the Transvaal to express their opinion, would, Major Seely holds, be nothing less than a national crime, and he urges that no sanction or support should be given to the proposal by the Colonial Office before it has been fully discussed in Parliament. With the spirit of Major Seely's letter we entirely agree. What we want to see in South Africa is not rapid prosperity achieved by cheap slave labour, but progressive development in a progressive community.
Previous page
