Sessional_Paper_1901 — Page 823

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The Chairman. In the old days at the Peak, when water had to be drawn from a well, they had to do it.

Mr. Badeley. Suppose a large number of ricksha coolies were thrown out of em- ployment in consequence of the introduction of the tram would they take to the work of private chair coolies and help to relieve the scarcity, or would they leave the Colony?

A. I think you would always get a large percentage of them to stop on.

Mr. Badeley.--And supposing you put on three or four hundred public rickshas on the market, would there be a rush of chair bearers?

A. These 500 rickshas that are going on will aggravate the thing. It shows how few houses there are when the tenderers for these 500 rickshas had considerable diffi- culty in satisfying me as to where they were going to put the men. In fact, there were no houses actually constructed in which these coolies could be put. The tenderers showed houses in course of construction for the bulk of the coolies, or said "Oh well, I will build houses, here or there or elsewhere." There isn't accommodation for the extra coolies.

Q.--Supposing there were coolies brought in from outside, would they come in in practically unlimited numbers, or would the present men try to keep them out by some method? Would there be anything to prevent a large influx if there was plenty of house room?

A.-There would be an attempt to keep them out, therefore that is one of the reasons, apart from the question of management altogether, that you want a headman to work through. You want a man who will be interested in bringing them down. If you have no such man, these coolie clubs might combine together to keep the men

out.

Q. Then your proposal comes to this, to grant a monopoly to one man to pro- vide private chair and ricksha coolies in the Colony?

A. That would be the best way to do it. It is only on a small scale, the same system that all large merchants have followed for years. They all have their com- pradores, which simply means the medium who manages their Chinese staff and their Chinese business generally. In the same way you cannot get on with licensed rick- sha coolies and other coolies without having some responsible person to deal through. I tried one time granting ricksha licences at Kowloon to individual owners of vehicles. I thought that would be a good move, but it failed entirely. The men were always fighting together for the best vehicle stands and it was very difficult to control them.

Mr. Wilcox. That system would do in England. but it is quite different with the Chinese.

Witness. They had some tremendous fights between some men who wanted always- to be at the wharf and onst others-regular faction fights. I had to put them all away and have the licences under one man. The other system is all very nice on paper, but it won't work with Chinamen.

Mr. Wilcox. There is a tendency towards putting up prices in creating a mono- poly like that, is there not? Would the chair farmer, if we could call him so, not want to collect a dollar a month at least of the men's wages?

A.--I don't think he would want so much as that. He would of course make something out of it?

Q. He would, I suppose, make something anyhow?

A.

if you like.

You need not have one man. You could have two or three different men.

All the public chairs are not in the hands of one man.