Ka Leo o ka Lahui, Volume II, Number 270, 1 September 1891 — The Cheap Laborer. [ARTICLE]

The Cheap Laborer.

lt {isioni*hin£ to find in overy elime \vhere bugar i? grO\vn, how the planting fratojrnity arc on the

eame hunt after aid' |inimportiug the "eheap labdrser." In Queensland as in Hawaii, the v planter wants eheap labof to l'develope the resources of the eonntry." It h*as also been deeided, as usual, that the white man can't work in that sultry land; and there-! fore as the Ohinaman is prohibited i and thc eoolie has heen tried with results that were a trifle worse than open insurrection, and the South Sea laborer was abolished some time &go to make an election advertisement for the "Great Liberal Party," a rump of that same party being now in power, the government is now engaged in the importation of ītalians as the handiest method of filling the gap.

The men they *want are the hardy peasants of Piedmont, reared under the shadow of the snowclad Alps, and by some extraordinary effort of hard lying it is assumed that these exiles from the land of-feheglacier are fitted to fill the bill beyond the tropic of Gapricorn. What the sugar capitalist— whether in Queensland or Hawaii — wants, is not loeal born jtropical labor, but eheap labor, eheap ignorance, and eheap slavery, and fhis whole labor problem is based on a self-evident falsehood. Tbe ostensible reason given for the importa-

tion of Asiatics in Hawaii is that tlie white man and the Hawaiian cannot do the work required in the eane field, but they ean both do any kind ot work and do it anywhere. Either race will toil in the region of Greenland or on the Gaboon river in equatorial Africa— proyiied the pay is —and they are better fitted to toil on a tropical plantation than either the Ohin&man or the Jap, or eyen the negro: and thetheory that these "inferior races" ean laboT where the Aryan cannot is a ho|lo\v lie trom beginning to end. Sugar has been and is being successfully r«'4ised in Xew South Wales for half& century, without the aid of Chinese or contract labor of any deseription.