SLAVERY IN BRITISH INDIA.
COOLIE SLAVERY IN THE BRITISH COLONIES.
The British government emancipated the negro
slaves held under its authority in the West Indies,
thereby greatly depreciating the value of the islands,
permitting a half-tamed race to fall back into a state
of moral and mental darkness, and adding twenty millions
to the national debt, to be paid out of the sweat
and blood of her own white serfs. This was termed a
grand act of humanity; those who laboured for it have
been lauded and laurelled without stint, and English
writers have been exceedingly solicitous that the world
should not "burst in ignorance" of the achievement.
Being free, the negroes, with the indolence inherent
in their nature, would not work. Many purses suffered
in consequence, and the purse is a very tender place to
injure many persons. It became necessary to substitute
other labourers for the free negroes, and the
Coolies of India were taken to the Antilles for experiment.
These labourers were generally sober,
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steady, and industrious. But how were they treated?
A colonist of Martinique, who visited Trinidad in
June, 1848, thus writes to the French author of a
treatise on free and slave labour:—
"If I could fully describe to you the evils and suffering endured
by the Indian immigrants (Coolies) in that horribly governed
colony, I should rend the heart of the Christian world by a recital
of enormities unknown in the worst periods of colonial
slavery.
"Borrowing the language of the prophet, I can truly say,'The
whole head is sick, and the whole heart is sad; from the sole of
the foot to the top of the head nothing is sound;' wounds, sores,
swollen ulcers, which are neither bandaged, nor soothed, nor
rubbed with oil.
"My soul has been deeply afflicted by all that I have seen.
How many human beings lost! So far as I can judge, in spite
of their wasting away, all are young, perishing under the weight
of disease. Most of them are dropsical, for want of nourishment.
Groups of children, the most interesting I have ever seen,
scions of a race doomed to misfortune, were remarkable for their
small limbs, wrinkled and reduced to the size of spindles—and
not a rag to cover them! And to think that all this misery, all
this destruction of humanity, all this waste of the stock of a
ruined colony, might have been avoided, but has not been!
Great God! it is painful beyond expression to think that such a
neglect of duty and of humanity on the part of the colonial authorities,
as well of the metropolis as of the colony—a neglect
which calls for a repressive if not a retributive justice—will go
entirely unpunished, as it has hitherto done, notwithstanding the
indefatigable efforts of Colonel Fagan, the superintendent of the
immigrants in this colony, an old Indian officer of large experience,
of whom I have heard nothing but good, and never any
evil thing spoken, in all my travels through the island.
"I am told that Colonel Fagan prepared a regulation for the government
and protection of the immigrants—which regulation
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would probably realize, beyond all expectation, the object aimed
at; but scarcely had he commenced his operations when orders
arrived from the metropolis to suppress it, and substitute another
which proceeded from the ministry. The Governor, Mr. Harris,
displeased that his own regulation was thus annulled, pronounced
the new order impossible to be executed, and it was withdrawn
without having been properly tried. The minister sent another
order in regard to immigration, prepared in his hotel in Downing
street; but Governor Harris pronounced it to be still more difficult
of execution than the first, and it, too, failed. It is in this
manner that, from beginning to end, the affairs of the Indian
immigrants have been conducted. It was only necessary to treat
them with justice and kindness to render them—thanks to their
active superintendent—the best labourers that could be imported
into the colony. They are now protected neither by regulations
nor ordinances; no attention is paid to the experienced voice of
their superintendent—full of benevolence for them, and always
indefatigably profiting by what can be of advantage to them.
If disease renders a Coolie incapable of work, he is driven from
his habitation. This happens continually; he is not in that case
even paid his wages. What, then, can the unfortunate creature
do? Very different from the Creole or the African; far distant
from his country, without food, without money; disease, the
result of insufficient food and too severe labour, makes it impossible
for him to find employment. He drags himself into the
forests or upon the skirts of the roads, lies there and dies!
"Some years since, the unfortunate Governor (Wall) of Gorea
was hung for having pitilessly inflicted a fatal corporal punishment
on a negro soldier found guilty of mutiny; and this soldier,
moreover, was under his orders. In the present case, I can prove
a neglect to a great extent murderous. The victims are Indian
Coolies of Trinidad. In less than one year, as is shown by
official documents, two thousand corpses of these unfortunate
creatures have furnished food to the crows of the island; and a
similar system is pursued, not only without punishment, but
without even forming the subject of an official inquest. Strange
and deplorable contradiction! and yet the nation which gives us
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this example boasts of extending the ægis of its protection over
all its subjects, without distinction! It is this nation, also, that
complacently takes to itself the credit of extending justice equally
over all classes, over the lordly peer and the humblest subject,
without fear, favour, or affection!"
In the Mauritius, the Coolies who have been imported
are in a miserable condition. The planters
have profited by enslaving these mild and gentle
Hindoos, and rendering them wretched.
"By aid of continued Coolie immigration," says Mr. Henry C.
Carey,
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"the export of sugar from the Mauritius has been doubled
in the last sixteen years, having risen from seventy to one hundred
and forty millions of pounds. Sugar is therefore very
cheap, and the foreign competition is thereby driven from the
British market. 'Such conquests,' however, says, very truly, the
London Spectator, 'don't always bring profit to the conqueror;
nor does production itself prove prosperity. Competition for the
possession of a field may be carried so far as to reduce prices
below prime cost; and it is clear, from the notorious facts of the
West Indies—from the change of property, from the total unproductiveness
of much property still—that the West India production
of sugar has been carried on not only without replacing
capital, but with a constant sinking of capital.' The 'free'
Coolie and the 'free' negro of Jamaica have been urged to competition
for the sale of sugar, and they seem likely to perish
together; but compensation for this is found in the fact that
'free trade has, in reducing the prices of commodities for home
consumption, enabled the labourer to devote a greater share of
his income toward purchasing clothing and luxuries, and has increased
the home trade to an enormous extent.' What effect this
reduction of 'the prices of commodities for home consumption'
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has had upon the poor Coolies, may be judged from the following
passage:—'I here beheld, for the first time, a class of beings of
whom we have heard much, and for whom I have felt considerable
interest. I refer to the Coolies imported by the British government
to take the places of the faineant negroes, when the apprenticeship
system was abolished. Those I saw were wandering
about the streets, dressed rather tastefully, but always meanly,
and usually carrying over their shoulder a sort of chiffonnier's
sack, in which they threw whatever refuse stuff they found in the
streets or received as charity. Their figures are generally superb,
and their Eastern costume, to which they adhere as far as their
poverty will permit of any clothing, sets off their lithe and graceful
forms to great advantage. Their faces are almost uniformly
of the finest classic mould, and illuminated by pairs of those
dark, swimming, and propitiatory eyes which exhaust the language
of tenderness and passion at a glance. But they are the
most inveterate mendicants on the island. It is said that those
brought from the interior of India are faithful and efficient workmen,
while those from Calcutta and its vicinity are good for
nothing. Those that were prowling about the streets of Spanish
Town and Kingston, I presume were of the latter class, for there
is not a planter on the island, it is said, from whom it would be
more difficult to get any work than from one of them. They subsist
by begging altogether. They are not vicious nor intemperate,
nor troublesome particularly, except as beggars. In that calling
they have a pertinacity before which a Northern mendicant would
grow pale. They will not be denied. They will stand perfectly
still and look through a window from the street for a quarter of
an hour, if not driven away, with their imploring eyes fixed upon
you like a stricken deer, without saying a word or moving a
muscle. They act as if it were no disgrace for them to beg, as if
an indemnification which they are entitled to expect, for the outrage
perpetrated upon them in bringing them from their distant
homes to this strange island, is a daily supply of their few and
cheap necessities, as they call for them. I confess that their
begging did not leave upon my mind the impression produced by
ordinary mendicancy. They do not look as if they ought to
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work. I never saw one smile; and though they showed no positive
suffering, I never saw one look happy. Each face seemed to
be constantly telling the unhappy story of their woes, and, like
fragments of a broken mirror, each reflecting in all its hateful
proportions the national outrage of which they are the victims.'"
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