a fair number of your hangers-on. Go when you are tired of it, and come back when you feel inclined." Later on, the actual planting and culture of the cane demanded a more intelligent and reliable class of field labourers, who had to be paid at a rate which would not disqualify the planter for competition with employers of coloured labour in the same business elsewhere. For the supply of this labour the islands of Polynesia formed the only recruiting ground available. The cultivation of large areas of cane entailed, ultimately, the employment of numbers of skilled and highly paid white artisans in crushing and refining.
Recruiting among the islands for field labour in tropical agriculture began practically in 1875, by which time there were nearly 13,000 acres under cane. The traffic was almost from the first subject to the provisions of the Imperial Pacific Islanders' Protection Acts of 1872 and 1875. From 1879, Colonial legislation provided, as the necessity for each became apparent, strict regulations regarding rationing, housing, payment, medical attendance, term of service, return of the labourers to their proper islands, the supervision of recruiters by Government agents on board the vessels and the protection of labourers by inspectors in the agricultural districts.
In the ninth decade of the nineteenth century the idea of a White Australia had captured the democratic electorates of Queensland. The aborigine, in whose possession an inexplicable, but inexcusable, blunder on the part of the Creator had placed the Australian continent before white men "discovered" it, was negligible because he was dying out in obedience to a law of nature, but, at all events, the immigrant black man must go. There was no place for him in a Utopia where a limitless wages-fund—accumulated in the hands of capitalists and ipso facto wrongfully accumulated—awaited distribution among a restricted number of white workers. It was in vain that the capitalist remonstrated that the proposed action would put an end to the industry and ruin those who had invested their all in it, for the labour logician was ready with his answer: "That is your affair; no industry that cannot afford to pay the workers the wages they require has any right to live."
White Labour made an outcry about the poor blacks kidnapped and enslaved, and the object of the outcry was evident. The impartial observer need make no mistake about it. To White Labour, the black man is not a suffering brother, but a noxious animal, no more and no less. But the cry of "blackbirding" was sufficient to rally the force known as "Exeter Hall."
It may be taken for granted that among the earlier labour recruits there were many who had no clear idea of the term for which they were to serve or the remuneration they were to receive. But it was very different with those who recruited after having had the opportunity of conversing with the returned boys of the first
