MARCH 22, 1906

VANITY FAIR

367

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## VANITY FAIR.

LONDON, MARCH 22, 1906.

## MEN OF THE DAY.

No. MVII.—MAJOR-GENERAL SIR R. B. LANE.

MAJOR-GENERAL LANE is a man of such good looks and delightful manners that his popularity with both sexes is a natural result. His family deserves well of English Royalty. He is a direct descendant of a valiant Colonel who sheltered King Charles II. after the battle of Worcester, and whose daughter took the fugitive monarch to Bristol disguised as her groom. For himself he gave assistance to the Duke of Connaught when bathing at Trouville, in which adventure the pair nearly lost their lives. The right to bear the Royal arms was the guerdon of his ancestor; the appointment of Extra Equestry to the Duke's personal service was his own reward.

He began his military career in the Rifle Brigade, and in 1878 gained his captaincy. He served with distinction in the Zulu War, and in the first Boer War saw fighting with Sir Evelyn Wood. When the Liberal Party brought about its disgraceful conclusion, the duty of clearing the military stores out of Pretoria fell upon him. It was an incident sufficiently unpleasant to be still vivid in his memory. He fought at Tel-el-Kebir, was promoted, and again mentioned in despatches. On receiving the appointment of A.D.C. to the Duke of Cambridge, then Commander-in-Chief, he had to be retired from the Rifle Brigade. He was Assistant Military Secretary at the War Office for six years, and has since held command at Alexandria and Malta. He was Military Secretary at the War Office when Lord Esher's broom swept away that post together with others more distinguished.

Of his coolness and humour those who were in the Zulu War have still a story to tell. A certain war correspondent of assurance and reputation had declared that the Zulus were crushed, that they would not fight again. Lane held a contrary opinion, and a bet of a tenner was the result. The battle of Ulundi followed. The firing had been a trifle wild. The Zulus were within two hundred yards and coming on fast. An order was given to resume volley firing. In the few seconds' pause Lane was heard to call out cheerfully to the correspondent, "I say, —, as we don't seem likely to get out of this square I'll trouble you to hand over that tenner now."

He can chaff a man without hurting his feelings. He never suffers from melancholia, and his cheery nature produces a like happy state in those with whom he comes in contact. He is now Lieutenant-Governor of Chelsea Hospital. His old friends still call him "Rowdy" Lane; he was.

JEHU JUNIOR.

## THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ALIENS.

By MAJOR SIR W. EVANS GORDON, M.P.

THE conduct of the Ministers with regard to the Aliens Act illustrates the most noticeable characteristic of the present Government—which is that it does not possess courage. It is simply driven along by those who shout loudest. At present the Labour Party is shouting truculently, and the Government is being hurried, in a miserable state of apprehension, towards costly Socialistic schemes. This condition of affairs may lead to the formation of a middle-class Party to resist Socialism. If this new Party shouts more menacingly than the Labour men, the Government will hurry towards a policy that will save the pockets of the rate and tax payers. They have been shouted, by persons who believe that shareholders in Rand mines are melodramatic villains in fur coats and evening dress, into a policy which tends to ruin the prosperity of the South African gold industry. Probably the Transvaal, as a self-

368

VANITY FAIR

MARCH 22, 1906

governing colony, will shout them back into the acceptance of Chinese labour under some face-saving appellation. A great many people are trying to bound them towards Dist- establishment; but even they cannot run in every direction at once.

The Home Secretary's new regulations, which have absolutely reduced the Aliens Act to a nullity, were an overt concern to bullying. Certain Radical journals, headed by the *Tribune*, were, until a few days ago, filling columns daily with sensational accounts of the woes of " political refugees."

Still more recently a great sensation has been caused by Mr. W. Rothschild's declaration that every Russian immigrant rejected at British ports had been sent back to Russia and shot without trial on arrival at the frontier. Mr. Rothschild gives no details, and his information is inconsistent with the action of the leading Jewish organisations throughout Europe, who, when assembled in conference at Frankfort during the Russo-Japanese War, decided that even then Jewish military refugees should be induced by every possible means to rejoin their regiments. This they would never have done if such men were shot on their return. Moreover, I understand-on the best authority-that the Russian Government has already issued an official and categorical repudiation of Mr. Rothschild's charge. The fact is that the opponents of the Act are consistently inconsistent, so to speak. From the first they have declared it to be inoperative and "a farce," and they still say that it is so. Only a few days ago the *Daily News* printed with evident satisfaction a circumstantial statement by a shipping agent that, by a carefully-devised system of evading the Act-even before Mr. Gladstone's changes-every rejected immigrant had been smuggled eventually into this country. In the same issue it gave detailed accounts of the cases of men said to have been hounded to certain death by the Immigration Board Inquisitors, &c., &c., &c. Such contractions as these show how far the Pro-Alien agitation is sincere.

Of course, those who know the true inwardness of the Pro-Alien agitation know where these refugee stories came from. There are certain business enterprises- shipping firms and others-who have made a very lucrative trade of bringing aliens to this country wholesale, and "looking after them" when they get here. Very often the last of their money goes in payment of their passage and in their first expenses on shore, and they are thrown upon the London streets in a state of absolute destitution. But that does not matter to those who brought them. They become, in the words of an authoritative witness before the Royal Commission, "ready-made victims of the sweaters." They try to support, not only themselves, but their families, on earnings of 7s. a week-that is a typical wage for a newly-arrived alien in the "greener" stage in the tailoring trade in the East End. Young women, not as an exception, but frequently, work as long as they are told to for the remuneration of one shilling a week and a place to sleep in. And yet these people sweep into this country, with its almost insoluble unemployed problem, with nearly one-third of its population on the verge of destitution, in hordes. In Stepney, in the six years preceding 1902, one hundred and seven streets passed wholly into foreign occupation. Why do the aliens come here, to pass into such miserable conditions? They come because they believe what the shipping agents tell them; because very many of them are below the standard which the rigorous Immigration Laws of the United States exact for admission into that country; because they think in roubles and copeks, and do not understand the difference between the cost of living here and in Russia, and to them seven shillings a week sounds like good pay. They come here "to do better business," that is their own phrase for it.

Of course the agents of the shipping companies and the other business concerns which make a profit out of the traffic in immigrants speak the language of the great bulk of the aliens, a compound of German, Hebrew, and Russian, called Yiddish. And, of course, the immigrants having arrived at a British port, desire to enter the country. The harrowing stories told in the Radical papers, and accepted as true by the more gullible Radical readers-who seem to be in a great majority-are simply the yarns fabricated by and prompted to the rejected persons themselves with a view to their getting advantage out of public sentiment, and being helped to evade the Aliens Act.

Questions with regard to these terribly pathetic cases were asked in the House of Commons by rightly indig-nant Radical Members, and the answers of the Home Secretary himself proved that in no single instance was there even a scrap of justification for the allegations made. The accusation that the Immigration Inspectors and Boards-the Board consists of two business men and a magistrate-had acted cruelly, or harshly, or unjustly, or impatiently was proved to be false-a "terminological inexactitude" of the Radical Press pattern. One man who might have colourably represented himself to be a political refugee from Russia had deliberately deceived the Immigration Officer by a false answer in writing as to his last place of permanent

residence; he said it was Copenhagen, and as Denmark does not manufacture political refugees, he was refused permission to land, being likely to become a charge upon public funds. In no other instance whatever was there even a shadow of a pretext for saying that any political refugee or any alien other than those manifestly undesirable had been rejected under the Act. And an answer given in Parliament by Mr. Herbert Gladstone to Mr. Stuart Samuel showed that the assertion that Russian deserters were delivered up to the Russian authorities by Germany was as much a fable as all the rest of the cock-and-bull stories printed in the Radical papers. There is no arrangement or understanding whatever between the two countries for that purpose. What was made apparent, both by the Home Secretary's replies in the House of Commons and by an independent inquiry undertaken by the *Manchester Guardian*-an invertebrate opponent of the Act-was that the Immigration Boards and Inspectors were acting leniently and with sympathy towards the immigrants; that any assertions they might make that they were refugees or were seeking shelter from political or religious persecution were most carefully considered, and that every allowance was made for the immigrants and every possible credence was given to the accounts they gave of themselves. The inspectors were furnished with lists of disturbed regions on the Continent, and used the information thus in their possession in favour of aliens from those districts. In short, the Act was working smoothly and excellently. Arrangements had been made abroad by which the shipping companies themselves sifting the immigrants who proposed to book for this country, just as in consequence of American legislation they have for long sifted those seeking passages for the United States, and tickets were refused to obvious undesirables. It is at the ports of embarkation, and not at the home ports, that the effect of Immigration Laws chiefly makes itself felt. And yet the Home Office had received no serious complaint from shipping companies with regard to the working of the Act. This is not, perhaps, very surprising when one reflects that only about 80 per cent. of the immigrants reach these shores in British-owned vessels.

Nevertheless, in spite of all these facts, Mr. Gladstone has "revised" the regulations by which the Act is enforced in such a manner as to abrogate it; it has been in operation two months and a half. By raising to twenty the number of immigrants which a vessel may bring without coming within the scope of the Act at all, he releases from its provisions practically all immigrants, however diseased or undesirable, coming from countries other than Russia. These travel, as a rule, in small groups of less than a score; there is no organised immigration of them. All immigrants from Russia, and these constitute nine-tenths of the aliens who swarm into our great towns, are henceforth to be admissible; in fact, the Inspection Officer *must* admit them, if they allege that they are political refugees, and it cannot be proved beyond all doubt that they are not. Of course, no Inspection Officer can prove that negative in the case of any one particular Russian; he has only to say that he joined a secret society or handled revolutionary literature, and the doubt as to his refugeipship is unavoidable. Equally, of course, every undesirable from Russia will say he is a political refugee rather than be debarred from entry at any British port. The want of veracity among these people is, unfortunately, one of their most notorious characteristics.

So a stroke of the Home Secretary's pen has put us back where we were before the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration issued its report. Then there was at least hope that a monstrous injustice to our people would be remedied; now there is none, at least as far as the Government's intentions are concerned. The statistician of the London County Council told the Royal Commission that, according to his estimate more than 52,000 people had left Bethnal Green between 1891 and 1901, and said: "It is safe to infer that the Alien Immigration for the most part presses out the purely British population." The displacement involves almost intolerable hardships for the poorer classes of the East End workers who depend for the chance of getting the work by which they live on being at hand to apply for and commence it when it is offered. The Commission, in their report, wrote of the terrible overcrowding by means of which aliens are enabled to outbid English people in the competition for dwelling accommodation. The details are not mentionable in a paper with a general circulation. "Within the walls of the houses wherein such overcrowding exists," said the Commissioners, "health, cleanliness, decency, even morality must necessarily be sacrificed." The medical journals have frequently called attention to the serious risk of an outbreak of epidemic disease in the serwering alien *entassgements*.

The Aliens Act was fast remedying these abuses. Yet it has been rendered null and void by a decree of the Home Secretary. Why? Because the Government were afraid of the Pro-Alien shouting. They have replaced an intolerable burden on the backs of our own poorest classes. It is my hope and expectation that they will live to learn that there are more formidable forces to fear than the interests of foreign shipping companies and the employers of sweated foreign labour.