Chapter XII: The French in Indo-China

Much as we all hate to be fed plain knowledge, preferring our learning disguised with the sauce of entertainment, like castor-oil in orange-juice, I fear we must taste a few of the bitter spots in the history of Indo-China before we can properly savor the present position of France in her greatest Far Eastern possession.

All the land from Tonkin to Cochinchina was conquered and colonized by the Chinese more than two centuries before the beginning of the so-called Christian era. From that time China ruled the region off and on; it was in fact five times a Chinese colony. Once, shortly before Christ, a woman of Annam governed for three years, but after another brief hiatus or two China held unbroken sway from the third to the tenth century, until the revolution of 968 A.D. During that millennium Annam took on a complete Chinese culture, and has kept most of it down to this day. Then there were various native dynasties until 1407, when, under the Ming, China again ruled until 1428. Even after that, though there was no interference from Peking, and the Manchus held Tonkin only in name, the people of the Eminent South, like Siam, Burma, and other former dependencies, paid a modest tribute to the northern emperor, as the easiest way out of risking more fighting. Koang-de, the Annamese Son of Heaven, was still considered a vassal of the emperor of China—the occupants of the throne at Hué are in fact still proud to claim descent from the Chinese imperial family of before the days of the pigtailed Manchus. Toward the end of Chinese domination the Annamese could function even in China proper as mandarins, generals, and still higher officials, so that the line between the two peoples was almost obliterated.

In the mess that followed the Manchu conquest of China, a Tonkinese fisherman founded a new dynasty, which ruled at Hanoï until the end of the eighteenth century. Then, the country having naturally broken in two in the middle, a rebellion overthrew the ruling Nguyen family of the south and the Tai might have taken the country in hand, had there not arisen that epic hero among the Annamese, Nguyen-anh, who in 1802 took the name of Gia-long. This founder of the present dynasty united under one rule what are to-day three of the five divisions of Indo-China—Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina—establishing his capital at Hué, being the first to group under the jade scepter everything from the frontiers of China to the banks of the Mekong.

But his victory was not so complete or so simply won as this may sound, and strictly speaking he did not rule as master, for he had to pay for calling in outside help. As usual it was a squabble between native factions that gave the less naïve Europeans their chance. Though they had already begun to visit these shores in the way of commerce during the sixteenth century, the French first had official contact with Annam in 1787, when the future Gia-long was fighting to recover the position of his family. Finding himself, in his war with the Tai and three brother usurpers, in imminent danger of being driven out of his native land, he ill-advisedly followed the suggestion of the French bishop of Adran and sent an embassy to France asking for protection. He got it, with a vengeance. Also the wise bishop, who thought this a fine chance to counterbalance the growing political power of England in India, got a splendid tomb and a lot of Indo-Chinese streets named after him. Fearing perhaps that the embassy would not put things strongly enough, the bishop went to France in person and got promise of help from Louis XVI, or whoever ruled in his name. Before the assistance was delivered, however, Gia-long-to-be had to make a treaty with Louis promising to cede to France the islands of Touron and Poulo Condore off the coast of Cochinchina and give the French a concession at Tourane. Then the French sent troops from Pondicherry and helped Nguyen-anh to overthrow his enemies and to acquire by 1801 sway over all the present Indo-China except Cambodia and the Laos, in short to become Gia-long the Great.

Though Gia-long died in 1820 without perhaps suspecting the truth, this opening wedge eventually led to the establishment of French authority over all Indo-China. But the successors of Gia-long showed themselves “very ungrateful” to the French. His immediate successor, his natural son Minh-mang, broke off with Europe in order to get the support of China, and after considerable rough work, including the massacring of many native Christians, died by falling off a horse, a failing he seemed to have in common with some modern princes, leaving behind him seventy-one children, of whom forty-nine were sons—not a bad record for a man who died young. The choice among these must have been difficult, and it does not seem to have been particularly successful, for the son who followed him under the name of Thieu-tri left no great fame behind him. But then came Tu-duc, who massacred many more native Christians and their European missionaries. Though they probably wanted to be martyrs anyway, the killing of the ecclesiastics was made the pretext for the declaring of war. A Franco-Spanish squadron took Touron and finally Saïgon; Tourane was seized by the French; Tu-duc, besieged in his own capital at Hué, gave up all Saïgon Province; and by 1867 all lower Cochinchina had passed into the possession of France and became the French colony it has remained ever since.

Cambodia was already considered a protectorate of France; for Norodom, father of the present octogenarian king, Sisowath, had for better or for worse placed his country under the protection of the French in 1863. The French gradually crowded upon the Chinese in upper Tonkin, to make up for the British advance in Burma, and there was long and sometimes severe fighting, with “some splendid feats at arms,” according to French historians. There was an opposition or anti-imperialistic party in France, but as usual this minor opinion was crowded into the background. This time the French intrenched themselves in the citadel of Hué and put on the throne a new emperor, the old one fleeing among the Moï after massacring several thousand more native Christians. The war for the possession of Tonkin lasted a long time. In 1873 Dupuis and a hundred French soldiers captured Hanoï, though it was the Portuguese and Dutch who had long had “factories” in the rich delta of the Red River; and China, which had given her Tonkinese vassals no more assistance than she did the Burmese against the British, was at length forced to acknowledge all Tonkin to be under the “protection” of France. Thus by 1885 the whole of present-day Indo-China, from end to end and from Siam to the China Sea, a country about the size of Texas, therefore larger than France, was consolidated under French rule; except that the Angkor region was added later. Plainly speaking, though the French talk of “treaties” as if an equal sovereign people had requested them to take over the task of governing, not only Cochinchina but all Indo-China was stolen bit by bit as a result of the simplicity of Gia-long and the killing of those French missionaries in 1858. Bright little pupils will recall that the French had similar schemes afoot in Mexico at the very time they were fighting for Saïgon, and in Asia one realizes that the Monroe Doctrine has certainly changed the face of America from what it might have been.

The French conquest of Indo-China, some of it by trickery and some of it, notably the Tonkin, by real warfare, is merely a part of Western covetousness in the Orient, not the individual sin of an individual nation. We can condemn that Western aggression without losing the right to give full praise to the French soldiers who did the dirty work, just as we can condemn modern industrial exploitation without charging present conditions in Indo-China particularly to France. Once we grant the righteousness of “imperialism,” of the conquering “for their own good” of colored races by the white, once we accept that trite tricky phrase of imperialists, “the white man’s burden,” any possible charge against the French is quashed. It is the old question: Is it good or is it bad for white nations to take over weaker peoples who cannot govern themselves well in our sense of the word—and who are so well worth exploiting? Is it better to be chaotic, “backward,” but independent, or modern and exploited? Is it better for a country even as civilized as France to take hold of these poorly governed races, these inefficient countries, and make them settle down to business and behave themselves, even if the “protector” does pay himself well for the trouble? Great minds set in cement will tell you, but I cannot; I find my judgment depending on the color of the day, the way I have slept, my breakfast, the mail I have received; it is a perpetual struggle between my reflected and my indignant self. And of course each individual will condemn or praise this modern way of acquiring colonies that are not called colonies, of subjecting people who are not admittedly subjected, according to his background, his environment, his wealth, and the job he holds, perhaps also to the breakfast he has eaten.

At any rate exploitation is visibly the _raison d’être_ of the French in Indo-China, though the Indo-Chinese are no more exploited than are the great mass of our own people at home by those few who have the strangle-hold in industrial matters, and by no means so much as are the people of “independent” China by their own legal and bandit rulers. One of the trump-cards in this modern game of colonial exploitation is a tariff. There are swarms of customs officials whose duty it is to see that nothing gets into or out of Indo-China—or even through it, for that matter—without paying heavy charges, swarms of Frenchmen with native assistants who examine every spool of thread that comes in from anywhere except France, so that it takes all day to get a few dollars’ worth of “foreign” goods through the customs. Things from France pay no duties, submit to no formalities, any more than the French need passports or lose time in landing. But all others, whether persons or things, are put to trouble and expense. A box of cigars selling for three dollars in China costs seven dollars in Indo-China, though its Philippine place of origin is as near one country as the other. Every kind of French drink is available, but no others; even British whisky can be had only if it is smuggled in. Every box unloaded from the average ship comes from France; everything not of local origin in the average shop is French, even those things which France produces much more poorly and much more expensively than other lands. A Ford coming direct to Indo-China pays 45 per cent duty—125 per cent if it comes indirectly—and sells for about eighteen hundred piastres, or more than nine hundred dollars gold. The little cars for which the French are noted cost from thirteen to fifteen thousand francs, so that it depends on the exchange of the day which car you can afford. There are not only import but export duties on everything, even paddy, or unhulled rice, nay, a duty even on the gunny-sacks it goes out in. More than that; everything merely passing through Indo-China, as the shortest or most convenient route between two parts of China, is opened, carefully examined, and assessed, though in this case the charges are called “transit dues.” Indeed, the more toothsome things from foreign lands are not infrequently consumed by the examiners and the empty cans sent on to the consignees.

Does all this money, paid in the end by the inhabitants thereof, go to the “protected” country? You have three guesses, if so many are needed. _La Métropole_, that is, France, gets real returns from its Far-Eastern possession; it is no altruistic “white man’s burden” the French are carrying there. Every year Indo-China sends France a check for about twenty million piastres. That nice little filial Christmas present of ten million dollars comes mainly from the _douane_ and _régie_, that is, the customs and the tobacco, opium, and other government monopolies. Besides this the “protected” people pay the cost of military occupation, not to mention many millions more in official salaries and the like.

But what France officially gets out of Indo-China is a mere drop in the bucket compared to what Frenchmen get by individual exploitation of a land where they have special privilege. French commerce has a virtual monopoly in almost anything except rice and betel-nut. There is plenty of iron, innumerable other natural resources, but the French encourage no modern industries in the colony, because they prefer to import from France the products of their own factories, so that after all it is the French capitalists and workmen at home who are “protected.” Take sugar, for instance; they export the crude at low and import the refined at high prices rather than help the natives to have their own refineries. Perhaps the best example of modern industrial exploitation of a “protected” people is the coal-mines in the northeastern corner of the Tonkin, which we visited on the second of those never-to-be-forgotten days in the Bay of Along.

The mines of Campha or Hongay, on the northern shore of that great wilderness of floating rocks, are open cuts, like those of the Japanese at Fushun near Mukden, or the iron-mines of Daiquirí in the mountains of eastern Cuba. There is no flaunting of the dreaded earth-dragon by digging down into the earth. Black terraces, mammoth stairways, are piled up the reddish hillsides, great amphitheaters cut in the hills, their walls so smooth and so sheer that one might think the coal was cut in huge slices, as from a gigantic cake. This precious region was discovered by a French forest-ranger wandering the woods along this coast no longer ago than 1905 and 1907. To-day the cuts are so large that the natives pickaxing on the slopes look like ants on gigantic black stadiums scaling the heavens. The roads through them lead from one grade to another, on and on, cutting through the villages, following the edge of the bay that is sprinkled much farther than the eye can see with those fantastic protruding rocky mountain peaks.

When we visited Campha, the black quarries swarmed with workmen, clothed in once reddish-brown cloth, now so dirty that they blended into the background against which they toiled. According to the mine officials and foremen these Annamese coolies are very lazy miners; certainly they seemed unwilling, after the manner of slaves, as if they were asking themselves who is benefiting by all this hard labor to get out of the hillsides the black stuff that is of no use to them. In fact the atmosphere of Annam in general is unwillingness, when working for Europeans, in antithesis to that of China. These beings dressed in sooty rags, these men wielding pickaxes with thin arms, have little to gain by their grueling labor under an imperious sun. There were women on the slopes also, their mouths bleeding with the sustaining and comforting betel-juice, and behind the coal-wagons _nhos_ ten years old, their worn faces under the coal-dust seeming forty, bent double their gaunt little bodies, half covered with black rags and tatters, their bare feet covered with a hard sole of the dust in which they forever trot for ten or fifteen cents a day.

We were carried in chairs and on horses up the slopes from where the cars of coal are loaded into barges with little houses at the stem, a kind of Paris green scattered over the top of the coal to keep the workmen from stealing a little of it to sell. We went so high that we could look down not only upon all the town below, but across a great stretch of the blue rock-strewn sea. There was not a temple or pagoda in the native town, not a flower, not a single bamboo hedge before the native houses, no more slim straight arec-trees topped by a parasol of leaves, no smoking incense, but belching chimneys, and pickaxes. Instead of the pastoral quiet of other Tonkinese villages there was a great roaring as of a waterfall, as of some great battle—the noise of the sifters. In contrast to this super-civilization there are wild animals in the surrounding bush; tigers come now and then to eat a coolie, when old age makes them more cunning than swift and strong, for they do not need much strength to carry off a mere human being.

But soon the 10.30 whistle blew, halting the work until two in the afternoon, and we came down for the _apéritif_ in one of the houses where the French live in the comfort they will not be denied even in the wilderness—and where even the women could not understand why my wife and mother, why our not yet four-year-old son for that matter, would not join them in a cocktail.

The hardest job at the mines is to get workmen, to bribe coolies to work here in the bush, and to keep them from running away again. Everything has been tried, and nothing works. As soon as the Tonkinese has a few piastres in his substitute for a purse he leaves the mines and returns to his rice-fields—and who can blame him? At the time of _Têt_, which also is nearing the time of harvest, all wish to escape to their ancestral villages again, and then especially they run away by the thousands. Every ruse and stratagem is tried, for the massed overseers and guards do not suffice. For instance, wages are paid only for the last fortnight of the preceding month, so that the workmen must either remain or lose many days of toil by running away. In order that they shall not starve, however, and out of pure philanthropy as it were, the company gives those who have worked well a piastre every ten days, which they call “making an advance.” Another scheme to hold them is to build a big covered market, a movie booth. Not long ago one bright administrator discovered a still better plan. Missionaries installed at the mines would keep there at least the Catholics, he thought. So an Annamese father of the Spanish missions was imported and a little church constructed for him, and the new parish already has some seven hundred coolies whom the confessional and a fear of future damnation keep from running away.

Sometimes, on the other hand, when floods carry away the dikes of the Red River, devastating the rice-fields so that famine settles down upon the delta, the _nha-qués_ flock to the coal-fields by whole villages, to find the rice they cannot get at home, and then there are as many as twenty thousand coolies dotting the great black stadiums, and a good year for the mine syndicate. As each new mine opens, at every new terrace begun, a Chinese man comes to set up his four planks and lay out his bowls of rice and provisions, often before a single shovel-stroke has been struck, as if he smelled profits from afar as the vulture smells carrion. He will be rich, this fat, physically flabby fellow with his freshly shaven head and his smooth, imperturbably smiling face, from the profits garnered from their wages, while the new coolies are still only poor ragged and dirty miners, longing to run away.

The coolies of Campha and Hongay are of no importance to the court at Hué, and not only is there no mandarin to rule over them, but not even a French functionary, except a gendarme who pompously decorates himself with the title of commissary. The real master is the mine; the mere people are nothing; as in all this modern world of industry property is everything, human life a mere pawn. The syndicate owns everything for many miles round about: the fields, the woods, the houses, the roads, the railways that carry the coal down to their jetties, the barges, the whole port, even the church with the sharp steeple, everything from the bowels of the earth to the slightest sprig of grass that may force its way through the coal-dust. If a village stands in the way of a new mine, so much the worse for it; down it comes; and when the syndicate constructs a new one farther on each native is made to pay part of the cost of his new house, so that he will be bound to the soil like a serf. The company is self-sufficient too; it produces everything it needs, from its tools to the rice for its coolies; and it is rich enough to be beyond the dreams of avarice, were there any such locality. The sixty-four thousand shares of stock offered at sixteen million francs a few years ago are to-day worth more than half a billion. The net profits the year before my visit were more than the total capitalization, not counting a twenty-million-piastre reserve.

One might conclude that at least this kingdom of coal brings its tribute to Indo-China, to debt-ridden France. Not at all; it does not even furnish the colony the coal it needs. Almost all of it goes to Japan, which pays well. Saïgon and Hanoï demand coal in vain; such factories as there are have to send their orders to Cardiff, and the railroads fire with wood, devastating the forests. After the fashion of modern industrialism, that present-day descendant of feudal tyranny, unknown stockholders suck the marrow from the country, dividing the profits among themselves, and leave nothing either for the colony or for France. As in France, the rich run away with the money that should be paid in taxes and leave “nothing but the hatred of thousands of coolies.”

As in these coal-fields, so it is with most rich enterprises in Indo-China; many a scandalous fortune has been created there since 1914, yet the public treasury takes no account of them. Not only is there no tax on war profits but not even an income tax. For the laws of France do not apply, and the law of the colony is to exploit it and the people thereof, not the Frenchmen who make their fortunes there. Nowhere in the world perhaps are war-profiteers more favored than in this rich French protectorate, for they can keep everything for themselves, down to the last piastre. “They are as miserly with their gold as they were with their blood when the war was on,” a French traveler bitterly puts it, adding that all those enthusiastic young men who conquered Tonkin gained for their country were the swollen profits accruing to the holders of stock in such things as the mines of Hongay. It is a misfortune that the people liberated by France from the tyranny of their mandarins, he goes on, fall now into the power of these new tyrants; bad, because little grains of misery make a mighty ocean of revolt, and just over the frontier of China there are something like half a billion yellow men who are gradually waking up. “For the true mandarins of to-day are no longer those lordlings in yellow robes and silk tunics, so proud of their long overdue finger-nails, whom we saw bumping their heads on the palace pavements at Hué, but negotiators and financiers, adventurers who now carry no rifles on their shoulders but operate far from the jungle, by thrusts of the stock exchange.”

As we have already descended to statistics, let me go on to say that Indo-China is now credited with about 20,000,000 inhabitants, of whom two thirds are Annamese, 1,300,000 Cambodians, more than 1,000,000 Laosians, and half a million aborigines of various races. To be still more statistical, the latest census, now some years old, gave the total population as 18,983,203, of whom 16,256 were French and 1191 “foreigners.” Most of the French and nearly all the “foreigners”—that is, non-French Caucasians—are in Cochinchina and Tonkin, more specifically in Saïgon and Hanoï. To-day there are some 30,000 Chinese and other alien Asiatics not included in the round figures above; and for the 18,000 Europeans, more than 90 per cent of them French, there are fully 40,000 Eurasians!

Many French colonials think it would be better to abolish the pretense of “protectorates” and really rule the whole country in name as well as in fact, make it all a colony, like Cochinchina, in order to do away with the sleek practices of the native mandarins and other functionaries, particularly in Annam. Either, they say, let us have a direct and undisguised French administration or return to a real protectorate, with kings and emperors who would not feel themselves annihilated, who would have the impression of being guided, counseled, even directed, but never dominated. On the other hand the French way of ruling through native chiefs pushed along by Europeans is a good system, and it is hard to see how native go-betweens of some sort could be done away with entirely.

For the French officials, particularly those higher up, being French as well as officials, rarely know any other language than their own; and therein lies perhaps their gravest fault. For they and those they rule over are at the mercy of any scamp who poses as an interpreter. Some French functionaries get official credit for knowing one of the native languages, but they seldom speak enough of it to get along in court, for example, without calling in the _interprète_. Just as there is a pidgin-English along the China coast, there is in Indo-China a pidgin-French, using only the infinitive of verbs and always the _toi_ form, so that “Toi connaître?” takes the place of “Savez-vous?” and so on, irrespective of tense or gender. It is an amusing tongue, which “boys” probably find as queer and as hard to learn as we do their quarrelsome Annamese. As in the case of foreigners who become so fluent in the bastard English of Chinese treaty-ports, it would require little more effort to acquire a speaking knowledge of the native tongue.

Individually the French officials of Indo-China are agreeable gentlemen, at least on a par with their counterparts in other white man’s colonies. But the government atmosphere is much like that of old Spain: no one seems to come out for his health or primarily for the benefit of the natives. While there is not the “squeeze” of China or the graft of Tammany, still there are ways of turning a politician’s honest penny. It is less dishonesty, however, that constitutes the official flaw than lack of ardent personal interest in the task in hand. “The soul of the missionary and the educator is what the ‘protectors’ of such a people should bring to their task,” a French _publiciste_ asserts. “But few officials will accept the sacrifice of wasting any more time and energy than necessary in a place reputed inadequate to their merits. The only thought of the average French colonial official seems to be to ‘make a hit’ with his superiors, for his own benefit and advancement, and get back to the fleshpots of Paris as soon as possible. He has no ardor, no initiative; the ethnic and social milieu being closed to him, his business becomes mere routine; he does everything with only one thought in mind—his career.”

The French have of course done much good for Indo-China. They have improved the cities, planted parks, opened ports, built roads such as the Far East had never seen before; and some one would certainly exploit the people if the French did not; their position is decidedly preferable to the anarchy over the Chinese border. But the guardians pay themselves well for their services. The government departments are greatly over-staffed; even the hurried traveler gets the impression that the colony is a refuge for deserving wards of the government who cannot be accommodated at home. The Council meets once a year in Hanoï and once in Saïgon, which among other things gives a change of scene, a “winter” and a “summer” capital, with lots of travel pay for mileage between them. The higher officials in particular are shifted often from one division of the country to another, whereas there should be two quite distinct sets of rulers, dividing the colony on ethnographic lines; for Cambodia is as different from Tonkin as Morocco is from Réunion.

The majority of the French officials in Indo-China are from the Midi, like most of her colonials. The speech of many of them sounds almost Italian, to say nothing of that of the Corsican river-captains and the like, who speak with a genuine foreign accent. This is natural, the Midi being nearer the sea and having few industries to absorb its ambitious sons. Yet they do not love the tropics. Most of them are frankly bored with life in this distant possession and, outside their routine tasks, are interested mainly in café pleasures and the joys of feminine society. There are some exceptions, of course, some who do their gymnastics every morning and some who become mighty hunters before the Moï. Now and then a scholarly fellow takes advantage of his ethnographic opportunities. But on the whole there is little unnecessary mingling with the natives, little outdoor life, except under café awnings, few excursions, fewer _piqueniques_ than one would expect in a land of good roads to delightful places and automobiles in which to reach them. Lest I be accused of pessimism, let us listen to a critic of their own nationality:

The Frenchman imports into the Orient the immortal principles of
absinthe and café gatherings, as the German does his beer and the
Englishman his sports. Individualists, rarely knowing any modern
language except our own, we have therefore a national selfsufficiency
and a suggestion of provincialism, which betray themselves the moment
we escape from the superficial cosmopolitanism of Paris—of a part of
Paris and a certain stratum of Paris at that. Café habits and the
customs of the politician, narrow-mindedness and prejudice,
disparagement, the faults of individualism, give our colonial
officials an incapacity for agreement and of organized collaboration,
a tendency to ignore realities, and to pay themselves with words. All
the colonial official’s thoughts seem to be turned toward his past,
toward the _Métropole_; the society he has left behind still obsesses
him. He learns nothing, and he can teach nothing. The discouraging
reality that surrounds him quenches his eagerness to know. How often
that has been impressed upon me when I wished to document myself on
Indo-Chinese conditions! To most Frenchmen the delightful landscapes
of Annam, the artistic tombs of Hué, the noble adaptation of a temple
to its site, all that remains dead-letter. Most of them are as
disdainful of the ancient people they have come to rule over as was
the famous governor, Maurice Long, who did not know a word of the
language, of the history of the country he ruled, and forged for
himself the most erroneous, even the most pernicious impressions of
its future destiny.

An old British captain, sailing the Far East for the past forty years, and familiar with most British colonies, insisted that, unlike his own people, the French do not coddle the natives of their possessions. England, he asserted, caters to the natives, gives them education and too much self-rule, and is all the more despised for it. Asiatics do not understand kindness and sympathy; therefore the French are respected. You must not mix sentiment with the ruling of inferior races, or for that matter of any other subject races, he went on; “for instance, you do not seem to be having an entirely happy time in the Philippines.” The French themselves assert that there is more liberty under their form of colonial rule than under that of the British. I rather doubt it. Though the outward French attitude of equality irrespective of race or color may sometimes give that impression, in the end liberty in French and British colonies probably sums up to about the same total.

It is true that the color-line is less tangible in Indo-China than in American or British colonies. French boys are deferential and even obedient to half-breeds, even to well dressed natives, such as an American or English boy brought up in a colony would scorn to glance at. Native and Eurasian boys of Indo-China act toward white boys as if they quite expected to be accepted as their equals, though that attitude does not exactly hold among adults. This freedom of intercourse has its good points—and certainly its bad. Yet the Frenchman is at heart no democrat; the line of cleavage is social rather than racial. There is every stratum of French society in Hanoï, from the haughty governor-general to the conscripts from manure-heap villages in rural France, and the common soldier is closer to the native rank and file than he is to the high officials of his own race, the governor-general socially more allied to high-class natives than to his own clerks and troopers. Yet on the whole it is better to be white. At the _guignol_ near the tiger-cage in the big park about the palaces of the governor-general the Annamese policeman raps on the head native children who do not behave, but is very deferential to the white children who sit elbow to elbow with them. On the other hand the sweat-dripping French soldiers who come out of their cloth-inclosed cages between the acts of these popular outdoor Punch-and-Judy shows and smoke a cigarette before going back to their stifling duties as showmen again are regarded by the upper-class Annamese more as servants than as lords. There are not only French children with their amas in the front seats, and half-breed ones already posing as French, as they will through life, but purely native children as well; and not far away the adults sit or saunter and listen to the good band concert, or cluster before the monkey-house and other cages, without any outward evidence of that racial dissonance emphasized in our own or British colonies. The best hotels in the colony make no distinction between French and Annamese, or any combination of the two races; the Annamese wife of a Frenchman “will be admitted to any circle in France to which the social position of her husband corresponds.” Yet Indo-China is almost the only place left where one still sees white men, and women, slap and otherwise manhandle their servants, and some Frenchmen speak to native railway men and the like in a way that in any other country would bring them the quite proper request to betake themselves forthwith to where it is reputed to be warmer than in the earthly tropics.

A French novelist whose background is Indo-China rates its “scourges” (_fléaux_) as—in the order of their appearance to the newly arrived colonial perhaps—sun, “boy,” _congaïe_, alcohol, gambling, opium, and madness. Most of these are self-explanatory. The “boy” alone is sometimes enough to drive the exile to drink, if not to madness, and it is not infrequently he who more or less surreptitiously brings in the _congaïe_, perhaps his own sister, sometimes even his own wife. The _congaïe_—normally a perfectly respectable Annamese word for girl—is in colonial vernacular what in France is known as _petite femme_, and by many other names, some of them far less complimentary, in every land. As our own pretty but stupid girls go into the movies or the “Follies,” those of Annam become the temporary wives of the French. There is a lot of romance about the _congaïe_, from those of the “Madame Butterfly” temperament, until one finds that she is sometimes hired by the week, like a _bonne à tout faire_, and is often passed on to a successor with the furniture. Nor is she the Oriental doll she is painted by romantic Latin novelists, though during her first few terms of service she may have youthful charm and perhaps be pretty. Many Annamese mothers do not blacken the teeth of their daughters because they wish them to live with Frenchmen, especially if they are the daughters of other Frenchmen, which is said to make an ardent combination much sought after among colonial Lotharios. But the _congaïe_ must love her François indeed if she eschews betel-nut for his sake; she is more likely to teach him the habit. There is little visible public opinion against these temporary matings, though it is said that the best class of Annamese look down upon the practice at least as much as do the most nearly prudish of the French. As in France, marriage is very difficult and its unofficial rival very easy; one may even take the _congaïe_ back to France as a servant.

One sees half-breed children now and then even in thatched hamlets far from the centers, while there are plenty of both children and adults of mixed blood in any city. Wherever there is a Catholic community cynical French males suspect any one in the slightest degree off color as having French blood contributed by the “missionaries.” The opposite combination, with the male Annamese the “protector,” may sometimes be seen—a Frenchwoman in Annamese trousers in some wayside village or peering forth from some native den in the cities. There were several instances in Hanoï of Frenchwomen legally married to Annamese, most of them imported after the war. The wife of a furrier who won a gold medal and his French bride at the Marseilles exposition of a decade ago never went out, but stood looking through her _grille_ like a captive animal. The Parisian wife of a barber in Haïphong lived in the not too large room of the barber-shop, with a bed off in one corner behind a bamboo screen that did not even conceal from observant clients that she was soon to contribute to the Eurasian population. The government is now refusing licenses for such marriages, but that naturally does not do away with similar unions as long as Frenchwomen are ignorant of the color-line or indifferent to it.

The French think that they cannot live in the tropics without a pith helmet, a cholera belt, wine, and a woman. One might add ice in the place of song. They have a curious belief amounting almost to a superstition that to take off _la casque_ in the sun, even the reflected sun, be it only for the instant needed to mop the brow and sweat-band, will almost surely be fatal, so that every little while the thoughtless “foreigner” is startled by raucous shouts of warning, and assailed with screams of dismay if he so much as thrusts his head out a window without his helmet on. Yet they constantly see the natives bareheaded, and either I must conclude that this, like the cholera belts with which even the women seem to torture themselves, is an unnecessary burden or that my own head is more _dure_ than those of the notoriously hardheaded French.

Of the eighteen to twenty million inhabitants of French Indo-China only the males over twenty years of age among the perhaps seventeen thousand French residents can vote—for the deputy from Cochinchina to the French Chamber of Deputies and for a delegate without a vote from the “protectorates.” Naturally those elected are Frenchmen. The number of French in Indo-China might have greatly increased of late, contends one party among this slight electorate, were it not for more or less official opposition. “For many of the rulers, the free Frenchman, the Frenchman who is not a member of the administration, is regarded as a troublesome intruder, an unknown incumbrance, a suspected person, a constant addition to the problem. This anti-French politics arose from the spirit of autocracy of those Cæsars with clay feet, Long and Baudoin, with their avowed hatred of every French civilian in the posture of a man.” This party insists that there should be a “white proletariat,” that many a young Frenchman, released from the army there, for instance, could live well in some part of the colony with his “companion,” and even contribute a large progeny, to the advantage not only of himself but of France and Indo-China. If only the government would find some means of helping him to raise and educate his children, they insist, he would be far happier than at home and gradually help to bridge over that gulf between the French and the natives. The point of view of this group is that of Brazil: that there is nothing wrong in mixing racial strains, legitimately or otherwise, that on the contrary this mixture of races should help to cement together more closely the different elements and perhaps breed a stock that would better endure the climate than does the pure white. In other words, they would emulate in human form the success of breeding hardy, tick-impervious, but runty tropical cattle with India bulls.

Offhand the impartial observer would say that there should be a “white proletariat,” that not merely French capitalists and officials should have the advantages France’s “protection” of this part of the world offers. But the governing class insists that there shall be none, or no more of one than is unavoidable, and for that reason does not now allow conscripts to be discharged in the colony when their time is up, even though, unlike those of higher social standing, they may be willing to marry their _congaïe_, produce legitimate offspring, and agree to remain in the colony for life. Nor do those in power encourage the coming of colonists from France. Yet, contend the self-appointed spokesmen of the “white proletariat” who are so bitter against what they call the “anti-French” policy of the officials, it was precisely because of the sacrifice of these “_petits blancs_” that France lost many of her other colonies.

Some of the complaints of the Annamese against the French are so well put in one of the novels of my companion from Hué to Hanoï that I cannot do better than to quote him:

You have seized Annamese in the streets of the large cities, with all
possible vexations, for the sum of two piastres owing to the
government, yet you subsidize each year a theater troupe at the cost
of 80,000 francs [written when exchange was much higher than now]
merely to amuse a handful of French during the three winter months.
You have inaugurated the régime of the _corvée_ for the building of
roads, or of buying out of it at a high price, promising the
population that for this it would be exempt from payment in kind, yet
by roundabout means you continue to requisition the inhabitants of the
villages for nothing more than that you may be able comfortably to
roll along in your automobiles.

In other words road-building in Indo-China is quite as it was under us in Haiti, by _corvée_, or payment of road taxes in labor. For three piastres a man could buy off from the ten days a year required of him, but the _coolies voluntaires_, who had even to bring their own food, were often taken far from home and sometimes kept for months. When food gave out they renounced their nominal wages, glad to get home at so slight a sacrifice. As in Haiti, the explanation of the officials is that subordinates in the field did things contrary to the orders of those higher up, but this must be entered in the column of dubious excuses.

But to go on with the plaints of the Annamese against their “protectors,” as interpreted by one whose history and temperament have made him as nearly sympathetic as the average Frenchman ever becomes:

The money you so cruelly cause to be sucked from the population you
spend almost entirely on your own luxuries and pleasures, your own
well-being; you spend next to nothing for the good of the natives, to
help them to profit by the procedures which modern science puts within
the reach of industrious, laborious people. The poor people everywhere
say that the government deceives them by using tortuous schemes to
increase imposts that are already heavy. They say that your protection
is not what it seems to be on the surface, that while a European can
go anywhere, except sometimes among the wildest tribes of the far
mountains, there is still almost as much robbing, kidnapping, virtual
banditry as ever among the natives when no Frenchman is looking on.
You let the people be ruled by native mandarins, pure bandits whose
immorality is no longer doubted by anyone—former “boys,” liberated
criminals, head gardeners who have known how to please by combining
pretty parterres and by offering flowers to the women of your
officials, intriguers and unscrupulous adventurers, beardless youths
who have won the favor of your ladies, sons of mandarins with the most
corrupted habits—whereas under the old régime this important mission
as father and mother of the people was confided only to men of forty
or more whose worth was proved. The greater part of the mandarins to
whom you have accorded your confidence are rascals who exploit the
people in the most shameless manner. We call them patented pirates,
differing from real pirates only by the brevet given them by the
administration, with the aid of which they can legally pillage more
easily and with less loss of honor than real pirates and smugglers.

You do next to nothing for the higher education of the Annamese, for
fear, you say, of making outcasts [_déclassés_] of them, as if
advanced instruction could make a degenerate of a man. It is said
everywhere that you wish to keep the native at an intellectual level
low enough to be able more easily to make him your slave. Thus you are
false to the mission you gave yourselves to civilize the people. You
cannot understand what attachments you would create between yourselves
and the Annamese if you set yourselves resolutely to teaching them
everything you know, without _arrière-pensée_. You have an example in
the Chinese, who, though they treated us more severely, had nothing to
regret for having inculcated in us all their civilization, all their
knowledge, to such an extent that Annam became a China in miniature.

You have too much pride; you disdain the natives too much; you believe
yourself to be of a divine essence compared to us whom you keep at a
distance, as if it were a question of a vile, abject race, worthy at
most of being your servant. You are jealous of our slightest
qualities; you cry out against our slightest faults, which for the
most part you have noticed among the scum of our race that surrounds
you, and which you attribute to all of us in general, without knowing
that the true honest Annamese takes care not to approach you, not
being able to support your arrogance, your conceit, your insults.

Yet though the Annamese, particularly of the Tonkin, fought long and valiantly to keep from being “protected” by the French, and there have been some revolts since what is considered the final conquest of all the Indo-Chinese empire, notably that abortive scheme to poison all Caucasians one evening in 1916, on the whole they now seem contented, or at least reconciled, and fairly friendly. Do they perhaps see the advantages of French rule, and recognize that some one would exploit them if these aliens from the West did not; or is it merely the fatalism and the infinite patience of the East that gives them the outward appearance of comparative contentment?