with an abundance of labour there will be no difficulty in cutting down wages, because it is preposterous to pay a Kaffir the present wages. He would be quite satisfied-in fact, he would work longer-if you gave him half the amount. (Laughter.) His wages are altogether disproportionate to his requirements. (Renewed laughter.)

Mr. Rudd, "Mr. Rhodes' right hand man, and a philanthropist to boot," said:

"If they could only get one half of the natives to work three months of the year it would work wonders. . . . They should try some cogent form of inducement, or practically compel the native, through taxation or in some other way, to contribute his quota to the good of the community, and to a certain extent he would then have to work. He was not advocating slavery. . . . If under the cry of civilisation we in Egypt lately mowed down 10,000 or 20,000 Dervishes with Maxims, surely it cannot be considered a hardship to compel the natives in South Africa to give three months in the year to do a little honest work. We have in power to-day a strong Government, but there is a morbid sentimentality among a large section of the community on the question of the natives, and the Government require the support of the majority of their countrymen."

Note how confident these men are that the Government is on their side.

Before the Industrial Commission Mr. Albu, another of the "gang," gave utterance to the following interesting views:

"If the native can save £20 a year, it is almost sufficient for him to go home and live on the fat of the land. In five or six years' time the native population will have saved enough to make it unnecessary for them to work any more. The consequences of this will be most disastrous for the industry and the State. This question [Mark this, British working men!] applies to any class of labour, and in any country, whether it be in Africa, Europe, or America. I think if the native gets enough pay to save £5 a year, that sum is quite enough for his requirements, and will prevent natives from becoming rich in a short space of time."

But Mr. Albu also had something to say about the wages of the white miners (Cornishmen and Northumbrians for the most part). His evidence proceeds thus:

"Are you of the opinion that the wages paid to (white) miners at the present moment are abnormal?

"In some instances they are abnormal.

"Is there any chance of getting these abnormal wages reduced now that there are so many out of work?

"Certainly there is: I think the white labourers are prepared to accept the lesser of two evils. If we close down the mines a lot of white labourers will be thrown out of work."

The Mining World and Engineering Record of December 16, 1899, puts the matter even more plainly :

"White wages have not been reduced in the past because the Uitlanders desired to work together for political salvation, and any attack on the white labourers' pay would have caused a split in the ranks. However, when new conditions prevail white wages must come down."

And, says Mr. H. C. Thompson in The Supreme Problem in South Africa-Capital and Labour, reprinted from the Investor's Review:

"The employers never made any concealment of their aims. The director of one of the great mining groups, talking to me about it in the summer of 1897, was almost brutal in his frankness:

labour, and have reduced the We have now the more diffi

"We have settled the question of native wages by one-third without any difficulty. cult problem of white labour before us. I don't at all approve of suddenly reducing wages, and so producing a strike. That is in every way undesirable. What we have to do is to shut down some of our poorer mines, and let the men walk about the streets for two or three months till their feet are on the pavement. They'll be glad enough then to take whatever we may choose to offer them.'"

But the mine owners have another string to their bow. As Mr. Jennings, manager of the Crown Reef Mine, said, "If we had complete control over the native labour we could teach the Kaffirs to perform all lower forms of work that are now done by white men."

And, if that fails to reduce wages low enough, then John Chinaman will be imported, and he is to be, in the words of Major Meany -gallant, genial, generous soul!"as nearly a beast of burden as it is possible to make the human animal into "!!

The ideals of these gentlemen found further expression in the speech of Earl Grey, at the meeting of the Chartered Company's shareholders, December 14, 1899. The noble Earl said (Times report):

"We must dismiss from our minds any idea of developing our mines with white labour. . . . It is obvious that the black labour of the aboriginal inhabitants of South Africa must be our first line of defence. An incentive to labour must be provided, and it can only be provided by imposition of taxation. I look forward to the imposition of a hut-tax of £1 per hut in conformity with the practice that prevails in Basutoland, and I also hope that we may, 'with the permission of the Imperial authorities,' be able to establish a labour-tax which those able-bodied natives should be required to pay who are unable to show a certificate for four months' work. I may add that the directors are already making inquiries on their own account as to the possibility of obtaining Asiatic' labour.'

By the Glen Grey Act, passed when Mr. Rhodes was Premier, a labour policy similar to that advocated by Earl Grey was actually introduced into Cape Colony. In order to divorce the native from the soil, and thus deprive him of his independence, the land clauses of the Act broke down the old system of communal tenure and substituted individual ownership; while the Act also imposed a labour tax on each native who is not himself the possessor of an allotment.

"The avowed purpose of this labour-tax' and its penalties, as explained and defended by Mr. Rhodes, was the forcing on of so much competition in the labour market at Kimberley and elsewhere, that the wage rate

would not exceed his ideal of 2d. a day. If they could make these people work, they would reduce the rate of labour in the country,' he said in one speech; and in another, 'It was wrong that there should be a million natives in the country, and yet that they'-that is, the Kimberley mineowners should be paying a sum equal to about £1 a week for their labour, while that labour was absolutely essential to the development of the country.'"1

These, then, are the ideals, these the methods, of the men responsible before God and man for the South African War. Well may Mr. Hobson say 2:

"If this war can be successfully accomplished, and a 'settlement' satisfactory to the mine-owners can be reached, the first-fruits of victory will be represented in a large, cheap, submissive supply of black and white labour, attended by such other economies of costs' as will add millions per annum to the profits of the mines. It is no extravagance to argue that the blood and the money of the people of Great Britain are being spent for this purpose; that at present no other definite tangible result of the conflict can be shown. The men who, owning the South African press and political organisations, engineered the agitation which has issued in this war, are the same men whose pockets will swell with this increase; openeyed and persistent they have pursued their course, plunging South Africa into a temporary ruin in order that they may emerge victorious, a small confederacy of international mine-owners and speculators holding the treasures of South Africa in the hollow of their hands."

It is for this that £200,000,000 have been expended in the vain effort to force the Boer Republics to their knees! for this 20,000 of our soldiers lie beneath the veldt! for this the Boer children in the Murder Camps die at the rate of 457 per thousand per annum !! 3

There is nothing nebulous and shadowy about this evidence. The charge of conspiracy is proven out of the mouths of the conspirators themselves.

And what, in the case of South Africa, the conspirators have so kindly done for us, Professor Thorold Rogers, in his Work and Wages, has done in the case of this country. Patiently and laboriously he has accumulated a mass of facts and figures, a body of evidence that cannot be gainsaid.

The golden age of labour in South Africa is now past. Speaking at Battersea Town Hall, on August 15, Mr. J. Keir Hardie, M.P., said:

"Before the war, working-class Outlanders, white men, were earning in the mines sums which varied from £40 to £70 per month. Under the regime of liberty' which has been inaugurated since the two Republics were annexed on paper these same men are being compelled to accept work in the mines the same class of work-for 5s. a day. The natives, whom we have gone there to protect, were earning 3s. 6d. a day under the old system, and are now paid 1s. per day."

1 Blacks and Whites in South Africa. By H. H. Fox Bourne, pp. 45-6.

2 The War in South Africa, p. 240.

3 Official Return for September 1901.

The golden age of labour in this country is also past.

"I find," says Thorold Rogers, in chapter ii. of Work and Wages, "that the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth were the golden age of the English labourer, if we are to interpret the wages which he earned by the cost of the necessaries of life. At no time were wages, relatively speaking, so high, and at no time was food so cheap." This in spite of the fact that "attempts were constantly made to reduce these wages by Act of Parliament, the legislature frequently insisting that the Statute of Labourers should be kept, . . . these efforts were futile; the rate keeps steadily high, and finally becomes customary, and was recognised by Parliament." 1

The high rate of wages then obtaining is usually attributed to the scarcity of labour caused by the Black Death and other plagues, and the long-drawn-out Wars of the Roses. By the Black Death, says Thorold Rogers, "probably a third of the population perished. . . It is certain that the immediate consequence of the plague was a dearth of labour, an excessive enhancement of wages. But the dearth of labour did not last very long. For, says Rogers:

» 2

"We learn from contemporary accounts, and here we can trust them, that a rapid growth of population followed on the destruction of the Black Death. It is said that after this event, double and triple births were frequent that marriages were singularly fertile; and that, in a short time, the void made by the pestilence was no longer visible. . . . I make no doubt that the population speedily righted itself, as it has done on many other occasions when a sudden or abnormal destruction of human life has occurred in a people, and the people has a recuperative power. That they had this power is proved by the events which followed.”3

So much for the fourteenth century. And, as regards the later plagues and the Wars of the Roses, Rogers says:

"But I cannot discover that the wages of labour were affected by any of these occurrences of the fifteenth century, nor by those of the sixteenth, until the general change in money values puts it out of one's power to infer anything from such events. I conclude, therefore, that the steadiness with which high relative wages were secured was in no sense due to the losses which labour suffered from pestilence. The existence of this formidable disease may have checked the growth of population; but if abundant evidence as to the rate of wages and silence as to the loss of life are to go for anything, it did not create a sensible void in the number of labourers." 4

And again, page 37:

"I cannot, therefore, conclude that either the civil disturbances of the fifteenth century or the visitation of disease, sporadic from the reappearance of the old pestilence, or endemic at times from the occurrence of the new, materially affected the population of England during the period before me."

Now, what were the wages of the workers in this golden age of English labour?

1 P. 27.

2 P. 12.

Pp. 11-12.

4 P. 32.

Of course, in any comparison between the wages of to-day and the wages paid in the fifteenth century, due allowance must be made for the change in money values. Rogers was most painstaking in his investigation of this matter; and his conclusion is that for purposes of comparison with modern standards the money values of the fifteenth century should be multiplied by twelve. "My multiple of twelve," he tells us (p. 172), " is moderately low."

"Now up to the year 1540," he says, "the average wages of an artisan in the country were three shillings a week; of a labourer in husbandry, working by the day, two shillings a week; "1 and "In 1533, a large proportion of (King) Henry's artisan's got four shillings a week even during the winter months, the labourers earning as before two shillings."2 Multiplying by twelve, we find, therefore, that, stated in the money values of to-day, the artisans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries earned from thirty-six shillings to forty-eight shillings a week, and the farm labourers on the average twenty-four shillings a week.

From this it will be seen that the English labourer at twelve shillings a week has not only, to use Mr. Rhodes' words abovequoted, "got to think over the proposition why" he "works at the rate of twelve shillings a week . . . and why" the South African monopolists "pay (the natives), including food, four pounds a month," but why he gets twelve shillings a week while his ancestor of the fifteenth century, whose work was much less productive than his own, got twenty-four shillings a week. And if he asks for a big domestic policy, can he have a better one than to bring those who pay him his present starvation wage to understand the true dignity. of labour, and to endeavour to make arrangements with his fellows to co-operate in bringing back the golden age?

Stating the wages of the fifteenth century in terms of the amount of food that they would purchase, and restricting the comparison to "the simplest materials of customary existence," Thorold Rogers tells us (page 57):

"In so cheap a year as this (1495), the peasant could provision his family for a twelvemonth with three quarters of wheat, three of malt, and two of oatmeal, by fifteen weeks of ordinary work; an artisan could achieve the same result in ten weeks. Such wages were regularly paid, and even more, particularly in London.”

And, on page 28, he says, referring to the same period :

"There is no reason to think that these labourers were paid well because their employment was precarious. Men got just as good wages in the fifteenth century, whether they were employed for a day or a year. Nor, as I have already observed, were the hours long. It is plain that the day was one of eight hours."

Thorold Rogers then proceeds to trace step by step the decline in wages and the rise in prices :