Both the House of Commons and the House of Lords
were on Thursday occupied with the discussion of the confidential Report made to the Government in regard to the prevalence of unnatural vice among the Chinese labourers on the Rand. Public opinion among all parties has been horrified by the disclosures, even though they prove, according to the state- ments made by Mr. Winston Churchill and the Prime Minister, to be somewhat less abominable in character than was at first rumoured. We cannot profess any very great sympathy with the authors and defenders of the Chinese labour policy in their present horror at the effects that have been produced, though of the genuineness of that horror we have no doubts. They were warned that the prevalence of vice in its moat hideous forms must be the result of the employment of the Chinese under the provisions of the Ordinance ; but they deliberately shut their eyes, and apparently imagined that somehow or other you could expect that compounds in which fifty thousand men, and those men Orientals, were kept in semi. confinement, and yet without prison discipline, would escape from the canker which always eats into communities formed on an unnatural basis and comprising only one sex. It remains to be said that Mr. Lehmann and Mr. Mason die. charged their duty in the Commons with moderation and without any party feeling. The decision of the Government, while at once expatriating persons against whom actual offences are proved, to adhere to the policy of allowing the Colony to settle the problem of Chinese labour for itself is, in our opinion, a wise one. A moral and political blunder like the importation of the Chinese under semi-servile conditions cannot be set right in an instant. Any rash and precipitate treatment of the matter might only lead to greater troubles and diffidulties.
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