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some new means of livelihood which will provide you with food and clothing and bring peace to your countryside? Great Britain is now recruiting labourers. Natives of Chihli, Shantung and Kwangtung are offering themselves in crowds, and ship after ship is conveying them across the seas. You people of Kwangsi should banish your fears and make up your minds to go too. Take the opportunity now offered you and engage yourselves freely. If from one village ten men go abroad, there will be ten men less to be fed and clothed during the year, and they will send back besides a thousand taels and more in earnings. Every year more and more of you follow their example, and ten years hence the number going will be still increasing. When your terms of engagement expire and you return to China, you can then either start business here again or buy property, and increase your wealth still further. There is no better way of bringing peace and tranquillity to Kwangsi. If you are too blind now to recognise your own interests and neglect the present opportunity, the existing troubles will become worse and you will lose everything. The poor will become poorer still and the well-to-do indigent. The good will starve and the bad die of hunger. You will be wiped out: there can be no other end. Weigh therefore the advantages and disadvantages together and make your choice of happiness or misery. I trust that you heads of clans who are men of experience will view this matter in the same light as I do, and that you will exert your influence to induce the young and strong to proceed willingly abroad. If they go the present evils will disappear, and if there is work for them abroad, money will come from them daily. I have every confidence in the success of this plan.
The conditions under which labourers are enlisted are given below. They must be strictly complied with.
1. The Transvaal is in South Africa, one month's journey from Hong Kong, about the same distance as San Francisco. The climate is good, not too hot or cold. There are already several hundred Chinese engaged in trade there.
2. China is sending a Consul to the place to which the labourers are proceeding to look after their interests. If any Chinese suffers injury in either person or property, he is absolutely at liberty to go to the