The Professor looked over my shoulder at this point. "Bosh!" said he. "They will become just a supplementary China--another field for Chinese cheap labour. When the Dutch Settlements were returned in 1815,--all these islands hereabouts, you know,--we should have handed over these places as well. Look!" He pointed at the swarming Chinamen below.
"Let me dream my dream, 'Fessor. I'll take my hat in a minute and settle the question of Chinese immigration in five minutes." But I confess it was mournful to look into the street, which ought to have been full of Beharis, Madrassis, and men from the Konkan--from our India.
Then up and spake a sunburned man who had interests in North Borneo--he owned caves in the mountains, some of them nine hundred feet high, so please you, and filled with the guano of ages, and had been telling me leech-stories till my flesh crawled. "North Borneo," said he, calmly, "wants a million of labourers to do her any good. One million coolies. Men are wanted everywhere,--in the Peninsula, in Sumatra for the tobacco planting, in Java,--everywhere; but Borneo--the Company's provinces that is to say--needs a million coolies." It is pleasant to oblige a stranger, and I felt that I spoke with India at my back. "We could oblige you with two million or twenty, for the matter of that," said I, generously.
"Your men are no good," said the North Borneo man. "If one man goes away, he must have a whole village to look after his wants. India as a labour field is no good to us, and the Sumatra men say that your coolies either can't or won't tend tobacco properly. We must have China coolies as the land develops."
Oh, India, oh, my country! This it is to have inherited a highly organised civilisation and an ancient precedence code. That your children shall be scoffed at by the alien as useless outside their own pot-bound provinces. Here was a labour outlet, a door to full dinners, through which men--yellow men with pigtails--were pouring by the ten thousand, while in Bengal the cultured native editor was shrieking over "atrocities" committed in moving a few hundred souls a few hundred miles into Assam.
OF THE WELL-DRESSED ISLANDERS OF SINGAPUR AND THEIR DIVERSIONS; PROVING THAT ALL STATIONS ARE EXACTLY ALIKE. SHOWS HOW ONE CHICAGO JEW AND AN AMERICAN CHILD CAN POISON THE PUREST MIND.
