Labour and Colonisation — Tlie Outlook. 37 



Taking our people in order we must necessarily put the East Indians 

 first because they are in the majority. Of course xe do not always imply 

 that the majority is the fittest, and much can be said against the idea 

 that mere numbers are of the first importance. However, the East 

 Indians occupy a place in our economy which would be very difficult to fill 

 were they absent. They have enabled the sugar plantations to at least 

 " mark time " when otherwise probably all would have gone. 



A sound principle at the bottom of all emigration projects is the 

 desirability of migrating in families ; all history shows that man in his 

 wanderings took wife and children with him. This ideal has sometimes been 

 ignored ; it was entirely neglected with Africans and almost ignored 

 with our earlier immigrants of all classes and races. A valuable asset to 

 every colony is a married man with children, and where there are real 

 homes with true love and kindness we get man's grandest ideds. Single 

 men and women are incomplete, for humanity, i.e., the species, cannot 

 exist without proper unions. We say that a man when he takes a wife 

 also assumes a responsibility ; " his nose is kept to the grindstone " and 

 he works all the harder because of his dependents. The value of such a 

 man to the community is obvious for he who works for five or six days a 

 week is decidedly more useful than a jobber. The East Indian is a 

 family man as can be seen in our streets every day, where father, mother 

 and baby walk together and the father often carries the child. Such 

 people are not erratic — here to-day and elsewhere to-morrow — but they 

 have something like real homes. This has unfortunately been ignored on 

 some plantations and the great blot on the system is the want of homes 

 for the overseers. It is quite obvious that continuous work can be best 

 obtained where the man has a family to keep, in fact an English farmer 

 generally likes to have a married man in his cottage because he is not 

 so likely to run oft* at a week's notice. From th s standpoint the East 

 Indian is certainly the right man for a plantation, but we must see that 

 he has a wife and that no interference with the cottage is allowed. 



The common objections to the East Indians is that he chops his wife 

 when unfaithful and that he is a great liar. In a way we can consider 

 these traits as nothing more than blunders which really come from great 

 love and friendship. That adulterers have been executed in almost every 

 country in the past is well known and that it is a duty to shield a friend 

 with a lie was also once common. From the wide standpoint we can say 

 that only civilized man tells lies, because he has so much law, custom and 

 order, with punishmments attached, that he must needs try to escape by 

 lying. This is seen in children who &re hampered by prohibitions and 

 lie to escape flogging. Unfortunately, the law does little to encourage 

 people to tell the truth, for most ordinances give little scope to the mag- 

 istrates. That a man should shield a wife, a child or a friend, by no means 

 shows a bad character. 



We now come to the negro, who is very erratic and hard to under- 

 stand. As a slave he had no responsibility beyond his work, for there 



